By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 17, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
The story of a local Ghanaian radio presenter being allegedly kidnapped by at least some five men who reportedly took turns in raping her did not ring the least bit convincing to me. Nevertheless, in John Dramani Mahama's Ghana, I had to say to myself, any absurdly bizarre event and/or incident is possible. And so I decided to keep my proverbial fingers crossed and monitor further developments arising from this case which has turned out to be a national scandal of "Dumsor" proportions (See "Police Could Have Prevented YFM Presenter Scandal - Pratt" MyJoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 4/17/15).
Initially, the apparently Ibo nominal identity of Naana Appiah Antwi gave me the knee-jerk temptation of throwing up my arms and snapping thusly: "There we go again!" And then, "With these criminal Nigerian cultural pollutants creating mischief and making a laughing stock of an otherwise genial and forward-looking Ghanaian citizenry, you never know where it will all end." But then, being that I have a half-Nigerian child myself, I stifled any temptation to wax self-righteous. On the face of it, the incident, as initially reported, made Ghanaian celebrities seem abjectly vulnerable in a way that could not be even credited to a decidedly primitive sub-regional terrorist organization like Boko Haram.
I was also waiting for the routine and logical ransom to be demanded by the purported kidnapper-rapists. It was apt to become a drawn-out battle between the purported assailants and the Ghana Police Service (GPS), with the hitherto much-touted mettle of the GPS being epically tested and stretched to the limit. Now it turns out that our prime suspicion was right from the get-go. The issue of the Jonathan-Buhari electioneering campaign billboards in Accra was also pretty much to the fore of my pondering of the Adaeze Onyinyechie Ayoka contretemps. Now, though, what annoys me in no small measure regards how Naana Appiah Antwi allegedly came by the Nigerian name which appears to have completely cannibalized both her ethnic and national identity; for in much of the West African sub-region, ethnicity and nationality are still the primary viariables delineating one's identity and personality.
We are told that Naana Appiah Antwi's father claims that the staged victim of kidnapping and rape had worked with a Nigerian of Ibo ethnicity sometime in a temporally unspecified past. So affectionately paternal had Mr. Ayoka been to his Ghanaian-born protegee that Naana Appiah Antwi decided to totally redesign herself and her ethnic and cultural identity and heritage, by assuming those of her former benefactor. We are, however, not informed whether such a seismic change of identity and personality had been effected with the unreserved consent of Naana Appiah Antwi's father. Mr. Kwesi Pratt, the editor-publisher of the so-called Insight newspaper, raises at least one significant question; and that question regards the mental state of the alleged victim of kidnap and rape. For me, though, equally relevant is the mental state of an Akan-Ghanaian male parent who so facilely allows his daughter to totally assume the ethnic and cultural identity of a foreign resident, merely on account of the latter's benevolent "working relationship" with his daughter.
In other words, I can easily accept Naana Appiah Antwi's hyphenating her last- or surname, such as "Ayoka-Appiah," in honor, gratitude and memory of her onetime benefactor. But when the alleged beneficiary completely chucks her birth-name into the cultural dustbin of self-rejection, only to completely assume the ethnic and cultural identity of a total stranger, however benevolent or magnanimous that stranger might have been to her, then, of course, serious questions ought to be raised.
On the part of the Ghana Police Service, we are informed that highly placed GPS officials were well aware of the hoaxy and erratic behavior of Naana Appiah Antwi, and that this most recently staged incident of kidnapping and rape was her fifth! Now, what caliber of law enforcers allow such perennial acts of criminality and moral depravity to go unpunished ad-infinitum? I am sorry to say this, but this kind of Ghana does not make me proud.
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