Omane-Boamah Deserved that Bit of It

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

I read about the simulcast appearances of Messrs. Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko and Omane-Boamah, the respective Executive Director of the Danquah Institute and the Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, and could logically arrive at only one simple conclusion – the perennially voluble and vitriolic Dr. Omane-Boamah deserves every insult lobbed at him by Mr. Otchere-Darko (See “Gabby Thunders ‘Stupid,’ Walks Off Live TV, and Returns to Apologize” MyJoyOnline.com 9/26/11).

Personally, I feel that the host of the Newsfile program, if he already has no quick fact-checking research assistants, ought to be promptly provided with the same. For, in the cyber-tech culture of the twenty-first century, it is rather primitive for the host of any high-wire political program to let rhetorically uncouth and incontinently mendacious operatives like Dr. Omane-Boamah to literally get away with murder.

Needless to say, in absolutely no instance has the Nkrumah-minted allegation of Dr. J. B. Danquah having supposedly been in the pay of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) been proven and/or substantiated beyond the scandalous pale of hearsay. Contrast the foregoing with Nkrumah’s well-known and documented dealings with the Russian KGB, crowned with his awarding of the Lenin Prize, and matters begin to get even more intriguing.

Indeed, the oft-quoted document which many an Nkrumaist detractor of the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics cites as evidence contains absolutely nothing to this effect about the man responsible for the landmark decision of Otumfuo Osei Agyeman-Prempeh II to allow for the incorporation of the erstwhile august Asante Federation as an integral part of Independent Ghana (See Okoampa-Ahoofe’s Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana iUniverse.com 2005). And the document in question, of course, is the diplomatic memoir titled JFK: Ordeal in Africa by Richard D. Mahoney. And yet, the inveterate enemies and ideological opponents of Dr. Danquah and his scions – both ideological and genetic – continue to liberally cite non-existent passages from the foregoing book with reckless abandon to impugn both the dignity and credibility of the de facto founder of Ghana’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana.

Mr. Isaac Essel, the author of the news article reporting the clash between Messrs. Otchere-Darko and Omane-Boamah on Newsfile, also scandalously, albeit unwittingly, and reductively erred in describing Dr. Danquah as “a founding father of the New Patriotic Party’s antecedent, the UP [or United Party].” Actually, Dr. Danquah was the instrumental founder of the first modern Ghanaian nationwide-based political party, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), out of which Mr. Kwame Nkrumah impudently and mischievously carved his tautological and politically extortionate Convention People’s Party (CPP).

What the host of the Newsfile simulcast ought to have done should have been for Mr. Samson Ladi Ayenini to have called on Dr. Omane-Boamah to substantiate his rather wild and execrable allegation with readily verifiable sources. Unfortunately, it clearly appears as if Mr. Ayenini had already decided beforehand to weigh in on the side of the Deputy Science and Technology Minister. In short, it is rather insulting that at the very moment that the host of Newsfile was attempting to prevail on Mr. Otchere-Darko to apologize for having publicly insulted the sacrilegious Dr. Omane-Boamah, Mr. Ayenini had curiously failed to also promptly recognize the fact that gratuitously desecrating the memory of the man who both selflessly mentored and introduced the future President Nkrumah into the mainstream of Ghanaian politics, was not the least bit of an act befitting a deputy cabinet appointee.

Personally, I could not care less about the rather startlingly infantile reaction of Mr. Otchere-Darko to Dr. Omane-Boamah’s unpardonable act of sacrilege; I primarily care that the hosts of all prime-time programs are adequately equipped, both intellectually and professionally, to frontally deal with bigotry and viciously canonized heresies and mendacities.

*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 “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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