By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 11, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
The newsmaker of the article did not have much to say (or was it the fault of the reporter?) that I found to be either interesting or relevant to the issue at stake, to wit, Election 2016. But it was amusing enough to make me crack up for a split-second or two.
It made me crack up a bit because it reminded me of those Trokosi ultra-nationalists who, like the locker-room jester vying for President of the United States (POTUS) on the ticket of the Republican Party, have made the issue of Nana Akufo-Addo’s qualification to practice law in Ghana without an earned law degree their perennial electioneering campaign agenda. And here, of course, must be recalled the locker-room jester’s near-decade-long campaign to prove that the first African-fathered Black President of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama, had not been born in America.
These Trokosi nationalists also have another name. They are also sometimes called “The Kpegahists” or “Kpegaists” if, like me, you prefer every letter of our Latin alphabet used within a phonetic context to have a sonic or acoustic relevance. But it is, nevertheless, quite a relevant question, especially where the all-too-logical scuttling of the chimerical presidential ambitions of some 13 jaded political choreographers are concerned.
The fact of the matter is that this is not the very first time that the presidential candidate, or candidates, of any political party, or parties, have been disqualified. And very likely, it would not be the last either. There is, of course, the rarely-spoken-about case of President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, whose fervid ambition for a second term at the Jubilee-Flagstaff House was effectively and eternally scuttled by some goons of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) on July 24, 2012.
According to some insiders who have pleaded anonymity, it was a strategic plan so deftly executed with inimitable finesse that even one NDC pundit had the chutzpah to light-heartedly characterize it as “God at His Sagacious Best.” Well, in the wake of the disqualification of the 13 presidential candidates of some largely splinter political parties, a lawyer and lecturer of GIMPA – the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration – wanted to know whether if the disqualified candidates, among them Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, proprietor of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), and Dr. Edward Nasigre Mahama, of the People’s National Convention (PNC), had not committed the kinds of clerical, or administrative, errors attributed to them and instead such errors had been committed by the likes of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the three-time presidential candidate of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) and our incumbent president, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, the Electoral Commission’s chair, Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, would have had the guts to disqualify these two political protagonists of the land and not expected to be stampeded out of the country.
Well, actually, Lawyer Clara Beeri Kasser-Tee did not put her query so bluntly and cantankerously. But the tenor of her query was unmistakably one of outrage and utter frustration. You see, I also cracked up a bit because among the disqualified candidates was Mrs. Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings who, we hear, has threatened to have Mrs. Osei publicly stripped naked, unless the EC boss reverses her decision within 48 hours. This is the second time that the bloody conjugal and political bedmate of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and her so-called National Democratic Party (NDP) have been disqualified, for either grossly misreading the contents of her presidential-election registration forms, or Nana Konadu had read the most significant document of her political career upside down.
You see, what ought to have shocked and even outraged the Trokosi ultra-nationalists to their cockles is the fact that the greatest lawyer of his generation to ply the legal trade without a sheepskin from Oxford, or any of the other globally reputed academies, has yet to commit the sort of sloppy clerical errors that so tragicomically scuttled the epic ambitions of some of the richest and best schooled men and women of the land. And so one can readily imagine the kind of epic mess and a nuisance that Nana Akufo-Addo might have made of himself, and the irreparable trauma and disappointment he would have brought upon the pates of his followers, supporters, sympathizers and, of course, himself, if he had actually attended a regular “Makola” Law School and been awarded the kind of law degree that ended Efo Tsatsu Tsikata at the Kwame Nkrumah Reformatory, otherwise called the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison.
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