Because Ghanaian Leaders Have No Balls...

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

Other than her wanting to rather quaintly and vainly, and frivolously, insinuate herself into a political league and an issue way above her head and ken, the point of Elizabeth Ohene's BBC-culled Peacefmonline article captioned "How the US 'Intercepted' My Reportes Filed from Ethiopia to Ghana..." (11/14/13) is not clear.

In essence, the former editor of the Daily Graphic recounts filing some five stories from the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa sometime in the late 1970s, I suppose, and having the last of her stories consigned to the waste-paper bin by her then editor. She had telexed her reports on an emergency session of the erstwhile Organization of African Unity (OAU), now the African Union (AU), deliberating about which of the Angolan liberation forces to officially support and believes that it was the resident United States' ambassador to Ghana who had caused the final installment of her reports to be killed, as it were.

Ms. Ohene arrives at such quaint conclusion because she had subsequently attended a social festivity, or party, hosted by the United States' Embassy in Accra, and been buttonholed by the resident American chief diplomat, she claims, who had commended her for the quality of her reportage but wistfully complained about the thrust of her unpublished final installment.

The fact of the matter, and one that Ms. Ohene apparently had failed to consider, is that the extant U.S. ambassador to Ghana may well have issued a thinly-veiled "friendly" but cautionary note to the key operatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where her reports were telexed, vis-a-vis the disturbing sensitivity of the contents of the reports within the scheme of the diplomatic relations between Ghana and the United States. And the unmistakable implications of the latter may well have factored into the decision by Ms. Ohene's editor at the Daily Graphic not to publish her final report.

The American ambassador would not have needed to waste precious technological and monetary resources "intercepting" the articles of a young Third-World reporter - she actually uses the rather jaded terminology of a "hack" - not globally renowned for being among the vanguard ranks of the most trenchant, or hard-hitting, journalists on the continental African media scene. In other words, Ms. Ohene ought to have been perceived to be in the same league as Mr. Aremeyaw Anas Aremeyaw, presently, by her purported American "intercepters" to have commandingly captured the diplomatic cynosure of the Western geopolitical giant. Unfortunately, there is clearly no evidence, whatsoever, that Ms. Ohene possessed such a dint or clout.

You see, their globally recognized economic puissance and abundance notwithstanding, key operatives of the American government are generally not known for the reckless pursuit of administrative profligacy the way that the GYEEDA and SADA operatives of the Mahama government have become notorious for their wanton misuse of the Ghanaian taxpayer's money. Needless to say, there is a level of administrative accountability in the way that public resources are appropriated by the U.S. government, led by the congressional or legislative arm of the federal government, that would stagger the apparently wild imagination of political neophytes like Ms. Ohene.

It clearly appears from the story that the BBC-African Service's correspondent recounts, that the Americans simply had been averse to having the Ghanaian public fed with the sort of "pan-Africanist" and "Leftist" propaganda that she had been professionally and ideologically wired to reproduce and disseminate. And for that, the resident U.S. chief diplomat only needed to put through a five-minute call to either the Osu castle or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promptly have our pathologically neocolonialist leaders briskly march to his/her orders, even as the country embarrassingly witnessed vis-a-vis President Hilla Limann and Ghana's scandalous boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games.

Sorry, Ms. Ohene, but your particular kind of faux-apocryphal narrative does not belong among the historic ranks of the latest U.S. diplomatic espionage contretemps. Note also that I gingerly avoid the use of the morally-laden terminology of "scandal" for Washington's latest fracas with its European allies.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Nov. 16, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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