Audio Attachment:Listen to Felix Kwakye Ofosu |
A member of the Communications Team of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Felix Kwakye-Ofosu, believes former President Rawlings should have shown a bit of sensitivity to the family of the late President Mills in his recent remarks regarding the death of his once beloved prot�g� instead of arrogating unto himself the role of a �pathologist�.
President Mills died on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at about 14:15 hours (GMT) at the 37 Military Hospital. Though the autopsy report is yet to be made public, former President Rawlings, told the BBC World Service in Congo Brazzaville on Wednesday, that he was shocked to hear the news of the death of Prof Mills but it did not come to him as a surprise.
He revealed that the late Mills suffered from cancer which affected both his eye and his ear, and "he couldn�t sustain it more than three hours per day."
�Quite frankly, I think had he been advised and done something wiser earlier on, he could probably have survived for another six, seven months I guess, but he got too tight, he got extremely tight and the poor professor passed away.�
But Felix Kwakye-Ofosu considers Mr Rawlings� comments as an anthema to African tradition and believes has the potential of further stirring the grief of the late president�s family as well as that of the wife, Mrs Naadu Mills.
�Ex-President Rawlings constituted himself into a pathologist and diagnosed the cause of death of President Mills and discussed what he perceived to be great details, the cause of what President Mills� death was. This is something that is completely alien to African tradition. It is simply not done and if for nothing at all�President Rawlings ought to have shown sensitivity to the woman�s plight (Mrs Naadu Mills) by refraining from saying things that has the potential of stirring further grief in the woman and indeed the family of President Mills,� he said.
Speaking to Radio Gold in an interview, the NDCs Communication Team Member described ex-president Rawlings� remarks as an �indelicate rhetoric�.
�It was Amakye Dede (the musician) who stated in one of his songs that if your close family member shoves you aside, you can�t expect any mercy from an outsider�Right from the very beginning, President Rawlings subjected president Mills to unwarranted vituperative attacks. He, at every given opportunity, sought to ridicule this great man. He treated him with disdain and contempt. We were witnesses to how at every given opportunity that he gets, he would disparage President Mills and describe him in the most unsavory language,� he said.
A downhearted Kwakye Ofosu, who likened Mr Rawlings to Brutus in Shakespeare�s Julius Caesar, was of the opinion that the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) had the effrontery to castigate Prof Mills because he (Rawlings) literally stabbed Mills at the back just as Brutus did to Julius Caesar.
�You recall how a member of a member of the NPP in Kumasi described President Mills as a chimpanzee and you remember the uproar it created in this country? We have had others who have said unprintable things�things that I can�t repeat on radio about president Mills. They were able to do this�They gathered courage, they gathered the boldness, the effrontery to do this because President Rawlings had decided to behave like Brutus who after being so trusted by Julius Caesar, planned with others to murder him in cold blood,� he said.
According to Felix Ofosu, even when death has laid its icy hands on Mills and the whole world was mourning a peaceful statesman, the ex-president was still bent on debasing him (Mills).
�One would have thought that having done this to president Mills and having seen him die under the most tragic circumstances, ex-President Rawlings would come to realize that there was after all something great in President Mills and he would have moved away from his attacks on the man... but that was not to be. In that BBC interview, at a time that the whole world was listening, at a time when world leaders of great standing had been sending tributes, extolling the virtues of President Mills, ex-President Rawlings had decided to send it a step further by dishonoring the memory of President Mills,� he said.
Source: Chris Joe Quaicoe/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana
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