‘Mom was attacked with a gun’ – KOD warns youth against romanticising coups, outlines alternatives

A Creative Arts Spokesperson for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Kofi Okyere-Darko, alias KOD, has strongly warned the youth against thinking coups and revolutions are the answers to their burning questions about governance, accountability and the economy.

KOD spoke to Prince Benjamin (PB) on the Class Morning Show on Class 91.3 FM.

“These young people have only read stories and not experienced it [coups]. They speak based on what they read [about] how things were done back in the day,” he bemoaned. “It wasn’t easy.”

To buttress, the media and fashion star spoke about “one of the excesses of the revolution that I experienced”.

He told a story of when he was “four or five years old when the prison’s church was being out-doored”.

“My mother, working together with some ladies, was baking bread and cooking kenkey for the inauguration. Some soldiers showed up from nowhere in a Pinzgauer – a very popular truck from back in the day the military used – they wanted to take the food away. And my mother was a no-nonsense woman, there was no way she was going to allow that to happen. Her reasoning was: ‘The food was meant for a purpose, if you want food, maybe I could give you some to eat but if you want to take everything away, no, that won’t happen’,” KOD narrated.

In the heat of the moment, he continued, “This particular young soldier used the butt of his AK-47 to hit my mom’s forehead – I was standing right there as a child of about five years – and shot at her, also.”

“Luckily, she didn’t die,” he added, noting his mother was injured from the knock of the gun but the shooting did not pierce her flesh.

The founder and CEO of the popular fashion brand Nineteen57 underlined “in a democratic dispensation some of these things will not happen,” compared to the times he grew up in, the son of a director of prisons, living close to the State House, at the time.

KOD argued what the young officer did “was not sanctioned by anyone but because of the temperature of the movement, because of the times we lived in, there were elements within the military who took an advantage and gave the government itself a bad name”.

“There were certain things that happened that then Chairman [Jerry John] Rawlings was personally not responsible for,” the NDC spokesperson doubled down. “People just took advantage of the situation.”

A revolution, KOD strongly warned, “will take us back”.

The radio star urged citizens, especially young people, to use the democratic process, social media and protests to register their frustrations and displeasure.

“They have to be very intentional in registering and going to the polls. Your thumb speaks for you. We live in an era [where] we have social media and it’s very powerful,” he said.

“See what happened in Kenya some months ago, which was replicated in Nigeria, I believe to a certain extent. It was young people. It wasn’t the elderly who decided to get on the streets. It was young people who thought they were getting frustrated and they wanted to be heard and a lot of changes were made.”

KOD said he “really respected how the Kenyan government handled that – quite a number of African leaders won’t do that”.

Seeing as Ghana goes to the polls on December 7 to choose between the NDC’s John Dramani Mahama and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) flagbearer Mahamudu Bawumia – to name the main contenders – Kofi Okyere-Darko encouraged voters to “register, look at your circumstance, look at where you’ve come from, look at how far we’ve come, look at how far you’ve come, look at the next step, and then [ask] does it favour you to go to the left or right? And then you advice yourself”.