Dear Zita, Akufo-Addo is the Giant Here!

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

I was uncontrollably amused to hear Mrs. Zita Okaikoi, the Mills-fired Information Minister, accuse the Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) of being desperate to clinch the presidency, simply because Nana Akufo-Addo had dignified himself, as well as significantly elevated his stature, by deciding to smoke the proverbial peace-pipe in the form of a courtesy call on former President Jeremiah John Rawlings at the latter’s sprawling Ridge residence in Accra (See “Rawlings Proved He is a Better Person than Nana – Zita” Ghanaweb.com 10/12/12). The disgraced former Information Minister also called Nana Akufo-Addo “a hypocrite.”

You see, the problem here is that Mrs. Okaikoi woefully lacks the credibility to impugn the motive behind the NPP flagbearer’s all-too-noble decision to hold forth with the man who once contemptuously referred to him as follows: “That dwarf, what is his name?” The foregoing infamous remark was, of course, made in the Manhyia Palace courtyard of His Imperial Majesty, the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu I, in the lead-up to Election 2008. And so it is not clear precisely what she means, when the former largely AWOL Information Minister accuses the former Foreign Minister under President John Agyekum-Kufuor of being guilty of vilifying the estranged founding-patriarch of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC).

It is also rather pathetic for a woman who has made a full-time maternal career of flying into the United States with the express purpose of delivering her babies, so as to acquire for them American citizenship and thereby protect them from the gross socioeconomic, cultural and political regression of Ghana by the so-called left-leaning National Democratic Congress, to be calling both the patriotism and moral integrity of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo into question.

Then also, Zita Okaikoi glaringly exposes her abject lack of common sense, because she does not even tell her audience about any the behind-the-scenes events that might likely have prompted the NPP leader to extend his exemplary courtesy call to the obstreperously vitriolic Mr. Rawlings. Needless to say, avid students of Fourth-Republican Ghanaian political culture are fully cognizant of the fact that there was a time in the recent past, when the Patron-Saint of Anloga appeared to binge on and breathe volleys of rabidly anti-Akufo-Addo insults. So it is rather flabbergasting and disingenuous for the sacked Information Minister to pretend that Nana Akufo-Addo is the one who needs to explain himself to Ghanaian voters. At any rate, as of this writing (10/12/12), it had been widely reported that Mr. Rawlings had pleaded with Nana Akufo-Addo to be fair and charitable towards the incorrigibly corrupt and criminally extortionate key operatives of the now-ruling NDC, in the highly likely event that he clinches the 2012 presidential election. That Akufo-Addo, characteristically, responded with unimpeachable candor, is what differentiates the latter from his vengeful political opponents. It is also what makes him the indisputable man of the season, as it were.

To be certain, about the only crime for which Nana Akufo-Addo gloriously and proudly stands guilty, is his foresighted and morally acute decision to unreservedly battle the unremittingly extortionate and rabidly anti-Akan Rawlings dictatorship that blighted our national political landscape with the blood of Supreme Court judges for a decade, from among the valorous ranks of the immortalized likes of Messrs. William (Paa Willie) Ofori-Atta, Albert Adu-Boahen, J. H. Mensah, Sam Okudzeto and Kwame Pianim, for a handful of ready examples.

It is also rather silly for Zita Okaikoi to cavalierly presume to second-guess the man who made it possible for her to become a notable public and political personality in the country, albeit an irredeemably flawed personality of her kind. I mean, what exactly does Zita Okaikoi imply, when she imperiously claims to “regret the fact that Mr. Rawlings had not expressed his ‘outright support’ for the NDC,” a party with whose association he feels so bitterly regretful, in retrospect?

In any case, which section of the Ghanaian political public has vilified the Rawlingses in recent weeks and months more than any other, but the very key operatives of the National Democratic Congress? And has Mrs. Okaikoi ever heard of the scandalous likes of Messrs. Asiedu-Nketia, Iddrisu Bature, Okudzeto-Ablakwa and Lantey-Vanderpuije, to list a few?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Selected Political Writings” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

###