Joshua Attoh-Quarshie May Be Off His Rockers

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

Garden City, New York

Dec. 11, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I have said this several times before in previous columns and hereby repeat the same: the infantile politics of personal destruction embarked upon by the anti-Akufo-Addo faction of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) will not wash. It will not wash because it is predicated more on raw emotions than reason. A typical example was the kind of callow tirade recently launched against the three-time Presidential Candidate of the NPP by Mr. Joshua Attoh-Quarshie, described as a founding member of Ghana’s main opposition party (See “Akufo-Addo Behind NPP ‘War’” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/8/15).

Mr. Attoh-Quarshie claims that Nana Akufo-Addo is behind the present hostilities raging in the so-called Elephant Party. He also characterizes these hostilities as a ‘war,’ but the avowed enemy of Akufo-Addo does not tell his audience precisely who started the war and for what reasons or causes the alleged war was started. Well, the Spanish have a saying that “It takes two to tango,” which means that there ought to be at least two equally belligerent protagonists for Mr. Attoh-Quarshie’s war to have been successfully ignited and smoothly prosecuted. I don’t doubt the fact that Ghana’s former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice is no angel. No, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Nevertheless, any petulant party operative who desires to pick a fight with the former Kufuor Foreign Minister had better have forensically sustainable facts and reasons for doing so. And so far, Mr. Attoh-Quarshie has provided nothing short of rank swill – hogwash, as New Yorkers are wont to say. Mr.Attoh-Quarshie also claims that while legendary Big Six member and father of Nana Akufo-Addo, the immortalized Justice Edward Akufo-Addo, was on the right side of postcolonial Ghanaian politics with the Teutonic likes of Drs. J. B. Danquah and K. A. Busia, and Messrs. George “Paa” Grant, Modesto Apaloo, R. R. Amponsah and William “Paa Wille” Ofori-Atta, among a host of others, the 2016 flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party was one of the “Verandah Boys” of the Nkrumah-led and admittedly extortionate Convention People’s party (CPP).

The lurid implication here is that, somehow, Nana Akufo-Addo ought to have assumed the knee-jerk herd-mentality of a mallard or duckling and blindly followed the political and ideological dictates of his father. And yet, the same Mr. Attoh-Quarshie sees absolutely nothing wrong with flouting party rules by abortively deciding to hold a press conference at Chorkor, in the Ablekuma-South Constituency of the Accra Metropolis, without informing his party bosses of his intentions. The press conference, we are told, had been intended to launch a blistering personal attack at Nana Akufo-Addo. Fortunately, the timely intervention of party leaders had laudably averted what may well have ended in the spillage of blood, as the anti-Akufo-Addo faction of the party has been known to do in recent weeks and months, in diverse places and regions like Bolgatanga, the Upper-East Region, and Kumasi-Asawase, in the Asante Regional Metropolis.

Mr. Attoh-Quarshie claims to have heroically fought for Ghana’s political freedom, but he still has an extremely difficult time coming to terms with the fact that Nana Akufo-Addo should elect to ideologically truck with the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party, rather than the Danquah-Busia-Dombo-led United Party (UP) as a youth. What I am clearly trying to get at here is the fact that Mr. Attoh-Quarshie inadvertently, albeit shamelessly, exposes himself as a charlatan and a hypocrite, a man who has absolutely no credibility and does not deserve the attention and/or respect of any patriotic and well-meaning Ghanaian citizen.