Pratt Told Me Wikileaks Exposé On Nana Addo Was ‘Stupid’ And ‘Total Rubbish’ – Kweku Baako

Since the recent exposé on Ghana by whistle-blower website Wikileaks, one of the personalities who has been viciously flaked and has come under a barrage of constant media criticisms is perhaps Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr.

The Insight newspaper Editor has been on the receiving end of some verbal vituperative for allegedly opening up to a US Embassy official that the flagbearer of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Akufo-Addo smokes marijuana so much so that there “used to be a cloud of (marijuana) smoke around him in the morning”.

Kwesi Pratt is reported to have told Gary Pergl, Officer-In-Charge of the Political Desk at the US Embassy that: “Nana Akufo-Addo used to smoke a lot of marijuana... and I'm telling you, a lot. Even in the morning, there used to be a cloud around him and you could see that he was high.”

Though he has stressed that it is not his principle to go telling third parties of confidential information he had of persons he knew intimately, Mr Pratt has dithered over whether he indeed did make the above revelations to the US Embassy official by consistently maintaining that he does not remember exactly what he may have said or not to an official of the US Embassy in his own office.

But his colleague senior journalist, Malik Kweku Baako, has counseled him to desist from being “evasive” and “indecisive” by stating publicly whether the comments attributed to him in the Wikileaks exposé regarding the smoking habits of Nana Akufo-Addo are accurate or false.

According to the Editor-In-Chief of the New Crusading Guide, after reading some portions of the report and placing a call to Kwesi Pratt, he was advised by Mr. Pratt not to put too much premium on it nor consider the report as genuine since it was “stupid and total rubbish”. However, Kweku Baako opines that the Insight newspaper Editor’s subsequent interviews on the issue shows that he is being cagey, and therefore urged him to either deny or confirm Wikileaks’ attributions to him just like Dr Kwesi Anning, Head of the Conflict Prevention Management and Resolution Department (CPMRD) of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training did.

“Mr. Pratt has been evasive and indecisive…and I put it on record, Sunday (Sept 4th) evening when I called him to alert him… he told me what had been written there was stupid and total rubbish and that it is not true. This is what he told me and I took his word for it…because I trust him,” he said.

Kweku Baako stressed that the leaked diplomatic cables should not drastically alter Ghana’s foreign policy with other nations specifically the United States of America, but cautioned those who interact with diplomatic officials to be circumspect.

“It is the conduct of those who interact with them, to have a certain sense that these people can formulate whatever discussions we have with them and there is no guarantee that it would be authentic representation of the discussions you have had with them,” he warned.

He held the view that Ghanaians cannot stop chatting with the Americans, Chinese and Russians, and revealed that he and some of his colleagues across the political divide have been interacting with diplomats for the last 30 years and was humbly waiting for some of those conversations to be made public so he could appropriately react.

“I have been to the American embassy, the British embassy, the German embassy…cocktails over the late 30 years and we used to deal with them…only God knows what they have said about some of us too,” he jokingly said.