Krapa Should Blame Otchere-Darko

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

As I read the rebuttal of the Press Secretary of the Akufo-Addo Campaign, Mr. Herbert Krapa, I couldn’t help literally falling off my chair, if only because I saw it coming several months ago. And the one person whom I squarely fault for hamstringing Nana Akufo-Addo and making clinical goofballs like Michael “Trokosi” Dokosi able to so brazenly and facilely make a punching bag out of the otherwise winsome and foresighted presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), is none other than the Executive-Director of the Danquah Institute, Mr. Gabriel Asare Otchere-Darko (See “Akufo-Addo Denies Daily Post Story” Ghanaweb.com 11/11/11).

You see, like all imps and mischief-makers, the Trokosi Boys are hell-bent on putting the chief architect of the landmark Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law/Code on the defensive, because it is only by so doing do they hope to remarkably divert attention from the epic administrative incompetence of the Mills-Mahama regime. And it was precisely in recognition of the preceding that several months ago, I decided to frontally take on these shameless and unconscionable truckers of abject mendacity against the former Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa South, only to have the one-man Akufo-Addo Campaign Legal Team called Mr. Asare Otchere-Darko mordantly accuse Kwame Aburaso Apeakoramaa Nana Okoampa-Ahoofe of indulgence in the crass, invidious and unsavory act of ethnic-baiting and asked to promptly explain why I had to continue to have my name associated with an institute named after my own great-granduncle!

In the scandalous tirade of an Electronic Mail dispatched to me by Mr. Otchere-Darko, which I decided not to make public, largely based on the advice of some relatives, friends and associates that I both admire and respect, the Executive-Director of the Danquah Institute flatly let it on to me that the sole reason for associating my name with his think-tank was primarily because of the fact of my having published a book titled “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). But what was even more scandalously damning, in the opinion of Mr. Otchere-Darko, was the fact that I had dared to caustically taken on “an old and well-known critic of Nana Akufo-Addo.” In other words, for Mr. Otchere-Darko, Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe was a complete outsider presuming to unwisely represent the ideological thrust of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition, and in the process attacking both the personality and ethnicity of a highly recognized Akufo-Addo critic who, implicitly according to Mr. Otchere-Darko, reserved an unfettered right to character assassinate the NPP flagbearer.

And so, perhaps, it would be all too logical for Mr. Krapa to ask Mr. Otchere-Darko to explain precisely why any attempt to put Mr. “Trokosi” Dokosi where he belongs, at the very bottom of Alajo’s mega-gutter, should be deemed to be unpardonably outrageous.

Obviously, the Daily Post editor, having woefully come up short of any potent and credible munitions with which to character assassinate Nana Akufo-Addo, chose the primrose path of innuendoes, thus his libelous story about the NPP flagbearer adamantly refusing to submit himself to routine searches at the Kotoka International Airport. The next thing we know, Mr. “Trokosi” Dokosi would even be suggesting to his readers that, indeed, the criminally primitive decision to allow prisoners to vote in Election 2012, after all, came from the Akufo-Addo camp.

Indeed, it is partly for the preceding reasons that I fully agree with Mr. Mac Manu, the former New Patriotic Party national chairman, that the other moiety – or 50-percent – of Ghanaian voters who did not endorse the Atta-Mills presidency, ought to arm themselves and be prepared to launch a full-scale war, if Mr. Rawlings’ clinically addled former lieutenant deviously attempts to take the country for a ride come Election 2012.

*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 “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

###