‘Working with Rawlings’ – Martin Amidu’s critique

I have avoided reading books written by my former colleagues reporting on their observations or experiences in the governments I served with them lest some contents in the books put temptation in my path to attempt a rejoinder or critique of the book and earn the displeasure of such a colleague.

I did not, therefore, intend to look for let alone to read, my vandal-mate, Mr Kwamena Ahwoi’s Working with Rawlings. But fate is cruel.

An autographed copy of the book was left at the gate of my residence on Sunday, 2^nd August 2020 by a former associate during the PNDC Government, a former functional executive committee member of the NDC and Government appointee of the NDC Government from 2009 to 2016.

Word was left alongside the book that, portions of it narrates on the authority of rumours if ever rumours now constitute a source of authority for “Professors”, that the late Mr Paa Kwasi Amissah-Arthur and I were members of the National Reform Movement.

I was identified and baited by the author and Mr Kofi Totobi-Kwakye, then the Minister for National Security, with the Vice Presidential candidacy in the 2000 election to breach the ranks of the movement. I am reported to have excitedly swallowed the bait. The narrative is an irredeemable lie because I can say and prove authoritatively in due course that neither the late Mr Amissah-Arthur nor I was an associate or member of the National Reform Movement.

With hindsight, the uninvited copy of the autographed book was the real bait to get me to read the book, so I may, as usual, be tempted to refute and expose its subjectivity, figments of imagination, delusions, and breaches of all the ethics of acceptable standards of scholarly research, and report writing.

I have always hated laziness in any professional work not to talk of the work of persons who hold themselves out as scholars, academics or mainstream professionals subjected to disciplinary proceedings by their professions for unethical products. Baiting me with ‘Working with Rawlings’ is the real bait of the author I have willingly and knowingly decided to swallow like a fish to give rise to this exposition and critique.

I served under the same regimes as a ministerial appointee and longer than the author served, played critical roles in them, lived them, kept some records of my observations and lived experiences. I can and will, therefore, contest some of the author’s or authors’ shoddy and unscholarly reported outcomes.