Could Akufo-Addo Be Scarier than the Rawlingses and the Tsikatas?

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

Garden City, New York

May 22, 2016

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Starrfmonline.com’s report of Nana Akufo-Addo’s most recent tour of the Volta Region was perhaps the best of its kind in recent weeks, for it uncannily captured the essence of what the 2016 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has been preaching all along, namely, that the “revolutionary” politics of ethnic disunity and chauvinism ought to have been chucked into the rusty dustbin of history the moment Ghanaians decided they had had enough of the morally reprehensible reign-of-terror furiously championed by the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). And before the latter, of course, the equally brutal, albeit transient, and insufferably bloody junta of the Chairman Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) – (See “Don’t Fear Me – Akufo-Addo to V/R” Ghanaweb.com 5/19/16).

He did not use these exact same words, for Akufo-Addo is rather too diplomatic and progressive to fully appreciate the fact that further roiling of the already murky and treacherous waters of political incrimination and recrimination would not advance the nation’s cause and rapid movement towards socioeconomic and cultural enlightenment within the shortest possible time. Already, too much time has been wasted marking time to nowhere meaningful or morally instructive, except the static politics of mutual self-denigration. And so it is definitely time to move the clock of national development forward. The preceding notwithstanding, what has been wickedly ironic here is the fact that those who brought us this abysmally low have also been those who have been the most successful in demonizing those who have harbored the best interests of the nation at large.

Indeed, it is for this reason that one had hoped that Nana Akufo-Addo would have spent a considerable percentage of his temporal audience with the Anwomefia of Anloga, Togbui Sri, III, highlighting the material achievements brought to the region by adherents of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition, and to have dispassionately balanced off the remarkable impact of such landmark achievements with those of the other ideological suasions. As well, Nana Akufo-Addo could have highlighted the seismic psychological impact brought to bear on the proverbial Ghanaian personality by such humanistically salutary measures as the Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, which the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has been fighting tooth-and-nail to restore, thereby guaranteeing the return of Ghanaians to the inexcusably depraved era of neocolonialism, unenviably, albeit doggedly and viciously, pursued by the key operatives of the Nkrumah-led regime of the so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP).

Likewise, rather than take the defensive path of apologetically promising not to discriminate against the Volta people or Voltaians, or Voltaics, Nana Akufo-Addo could have done even better to highlight some of the reasons why the National Democratic Congress, the longest-ruling Fourth-Republican political party, has not served the interests of the very people whose votes it gloats about having taken for granted in the cynical name of the World Bank. These tours, between now and Election Day, ought to be strategically seized upon by the three-time presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party to lay out his party’s development agenda for each and every one of the 275 electoral districts or constituencies in the country. Already, Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, Akufo-Addo’s astute running-mate, has been doing remarkably practical wonders around the country, as admonished some time ago by yours truly, by helping several rural communities gain ready access to potable drinking water and toilet facilities.

Of course, it was also very refreshing for Akufo-Addo to stay away from the obvious, the incontrovertible fact that reprobate political characters like Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and the Tsikatas, specifically speaking Kojo and Tsatsu, have indisputably done more to seriously regress the development of the Volta Region, both materially and psychologically, than any other Ghanaian leaders or political parties, including the so-called National Democratic Congress, of course. It was also morally and psychologically refreshing to hear the paramount chief of the Anlo-Ewe people heartily welcome the NPP’s flagbearer to his traditional polity as both a friend and a bona fide son of the soil. This is what nation-building ought to be about.

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