Akufo-Addo Is No "Cheap Opposition Leader"

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

If I were the executive director of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), I would not be responding to hired National Democratic Congress propagandists like the proprietor of the so-called Africawatch Magazine. According to a JoyOnline.com report in the latter's March 26, 2013 news edition (See "Akufo-Addo Is A Cheap Opposition Leader - Gabby" Ghanaweb.com 3/26/13), the career mercenary editor-publisher of "Wallet Watch" magazine has published an article claiming that the Akufo-Addo-led main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) is "scheming to bring about chaos if the Supreme Court rules against the party."

Well, I have absolutely no interest in reading the original publication of the aforementioned article; I happen to know enough about that spiv of an inky frat boy to waste my time raising my blood pressure. What those who seek to rejoin his shameless pieces of guff ought to be asking him is precisely what "scheme of chaos" that screaming son of a bitchy bastard has in mind. And for those who may not know much about this certified scam-artist, the editor-publisher of the "Wallet Watch" magazine was once widely known to have been used in an abortive attempt to run the historic New York Amsterdam News, the leading African-American weekly on the American East Coast - continuously published since 1909 - out of circulation by some white moguls and New York City power-brokers who did not agree with the radical progressivism and Afrocentric ideological agenda of the paper's late publisher, Mr. Wilbert A. Tatum.

The Ejisu/Edweso SOB started a paper called the African-American Observer which unsuccessfully sought to do just that. This was after his desperate attempt to landing a sportswriter's job with the Amsterdam News failed to materialize. I know the preceding for a fact because I reported for the Amsterdam News for some fifteen years, and also served as the paper's book-review editor and columnist. I was also one of the writers and former writers of the New York Amsterdam News invited by Mr. Tatum for the shooting of a group photograph celebrating the paper's 90th birthday anniversary.

Earlier on, Mr. "Wallet Watch" had started a biweekly called the African Observer, only to shortly discover to his utter chagrin that diaspora Africans, of continental African birth, were not interested in another vapid and porous carbon copy of the Ghanaian Times. My one regret to this day is the fact that I allowed this ragamuffin SOB to use me as a volunteer consultant and seminal advisor on African-American media culture and politics. Still, in a remarkable sense, this carpet-bagging scallawag may be aptly said to have paid his dues. Once, he got savaged on a Brooklyn, New York, street by an unindentified gang of African-American youths who apparently wanted to teach him a lesson in political civility.

To hear him tell his own story, whose credibility has never been forensically verified, to the best of my knowledge, "The Boy Koumassieni" had attended a press conference on the premises of the Ghana Mission to the United Nations, at Manhattan's 47th Street and Madison Avenue, and kicked a fuss with a Black cultural nationalist group over whether, indeed, the National Democratic Congress really qualified to bill itself as "the sole and most authentic heir to the Nkrumaist mantle." It was his vehement and nativistic protestation, according to the storyteller himself, that earned him his black-eye and puffy cheeks.

Needless to say, if, indeed, Nana Akufo-Addo wanted to forge the cheapest route to the presidency, he would not have headed for the august edifice of the Supreme Court of Ghana. Neither would he have thoughtlessly caused his legion youthful supporters and sympathizers to flood the streets in order to give a tangible and facile excuse to a violence-oriented party like the so-called National Democratic Congress to make mince-meat of the same. And then also, the right moment for Nana Akufo-Addo to have schemed for national chaos, or anomie, ought to have been in 2000, when the New Patriotic Party still held the reins of governance and ready access to the sanctioned coercive apparatus of the state.

You see, not that I expected the editor-publisher of the "Wallet Watch" magazine to be generously possessed of the same; but the fact of the matter is that common sense dictates that it is only when one has a forensically sustainable evidence vindicating one's cause of action that one resorts to the legitimately constituted courts of the land as a first option, rather than the cheap, albeit bloody, and tawdry route of mob action. This, of course, is in no way to imply that forensic self-assurance guarantees an automatic judicial vindication and/or victory. What it incontrovertibly implies is that one is generously endowed with a salutary and heightened sense of civic responsibility and statesmanship.

On another level, and a quite devious one, to be precise, the editor-publisher of "Wallet Watch" clearly appears to be scheming for either judicial nullification, in American parlance, whereby media intimidation hobbles the Atuguba court's sense of direction and fair play, or simply eviscerates its conscience and professional integrity, the very purposes for which its members were selected and appointed to the highest court of the land.

Interestingly, I just happen to vehemently disagree with those who seem to believe that the non-violent path chosen by Nana Akufo-Addo was largely dictated by the "yeomanly" activities of the so-called National Peace Council (NPC). Nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact of the matter is that Ghanaians, by nature, are among the most peace-loving people across the globe. The latter temperament, remarkably enhanced by technological globalization, particularly in the area of telecommunications, which has strikingly concretized Marshall McLuhan's concept/theory of "The Global Village," it is that has further opened the eyes of Ghanaian citizens to the salutary benefits of Western democratic cultural values and praxis.

Even a veritably terrorist organization like the "revolutionary" National Democratic Congress would have Ghanaians believe that it staunchly subscribes to essentially the same "Social Democratic" tenets of its German counterpart. Rather amusing, isn't it?

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

March 26, 2013

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