Akua Donkor Versus Nii Moi Thompson

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

July 23, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

You may not see it the way I see it. You may even be tempted to volley one vitriol or two at me. But the fact of the matter is that the only people pretending as if Ms. Akua Donkor's regular inclusion on presidential trips is an anomaly ought to rethink their gratuitous disappointment, anger and arrogance. You don't have to see or not see the same things in the value of Ms. Donkor that President John Dramani Mahama sees in her. After all, the judgment call belongs to the president; and he does not have to account to anybody except, perhaps, our rubber-stamp Parliament why he has chosen to make the woman who styles herself as a farmer a regular feature, or even a fixture, on his official trips both within and without the country.

If I remember correctly, Ms. Akua Donkor profiled herself as a farmer when she first stepped into the political arena as a presidential contestant and candidate of her own political party, namely, the Ghana Freedom Party (GFP). To be certain, whatever she has proven herself to lack, it is quite obvious that Akua Donkor possesses a far better, sharper and more poetic imagination than those supposedly upper-crust intellectuals who founded a political organization and called it the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Back then, as some of my readers may readily recall, I questioned the intellectual and creative modernity and imagination of the NPP leaders.

You see, I am a poet of some proven talent, at least as demonstrated by the fact that before I turned 18 years old, I had featured more than several times on the programs of Anokyekrom of the Ghana National Cultural Center, Kumasi. And presently, even as I write, I have at least 11 of my 22 self-published books stocked on the shelves of the Library of Congress (LoC). You know, you just don't get your books put onto the shelves of the largest library in the world simply for publishing them. It has to be based on merit; a disciplinary specialist has to read your work and decide that it belongs on the august shelves of the LoC. My royalties have come irregularly and in trickles. But that is not the point of my argument right now. What I am trying to imply here is that even Ms. Akua Donkor has a redeeming value.

I personally find the name New Patriotic Party to be rather amateurish and have said so in the past. I even recall that at one point, some of the key NPP operatives were considering changing this patently pedestrian and nineteen-centuryesque name. And then like most things dreamed up and thought about by mortals, everything went the way of preexistential silence and death. Or, perhaps, I ought to more appropriately say that everything went the way of the wind.

One "upper-crust" editorial recently suggested quite aptly that Ms. Akua Donkor offers President Mahama a nuisance political value. The fact of the matter is that sometimes a nuisance political value is all a leader as administratively desperate as President Mahama needs to take some of the heat off his back and feet. It is not about precisely what most of us are thinking about, or may be thinking about, I should say. On the President's most recent Italian trip, though, I thought it was quite fitting to have Ms. Donkor on board our presidential Gulf-Stream Jet as part of his entourage. After all, the trip was about "digitally" improving the way that farming is done in Ghana. And who best to bring along but somebody with "proven credentials" who best represents the average or typical Ghanaian farmer.

We all know, of course, that there are more Ghanaian women farmers than men. I hope you get the point that I am trying to make here. I don't know how many acres of hectares of cultivated land Ms. Akua Donkor owns. But I surely love the motorway-wide gab between both top and bottom front teeth of Akua "Ahoofe."

And, oh, I almost forgot the fact that I am also supposed to be talking about Dr. Nii Moi Thompson, a quite brilliant economist. I once met him at the Ghana Mission to the United Nations right here in New York City. I was winding down my dissertation, while he was still working on his doctorate at one of the State University of New York (SUNY) campuses. I still regard him as an acquaintance, though that one chance meeting with him was nearly twenty years ago.

What I just wanted to bring to the attention of my readers regards how fast and suavely Nii Moi Thompson has moved from being a jobless rump-Convention People's Party (r-CPP) Chief Economic Analyst to President Mahama's Chief Economic Advisor Plenipotentiary In Charge of that white elephant called the National Development Planning Commission. I mean, here are Ghanaians saddled with a government that does not even have a two-year development plan for the country, thinking of establishing a 40-year development template for a non-one-party democracy like Ghana.

Well, if you think Ms. Akua Donkor is a political nuisance, just think about Dr. Nii Moi Thompson and his 40-year Development Dinosaur.

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