Ghana Would Be Smart to Learn from Uganda

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

It is rather amusing to hear those National Democratic Congress (NDC) members, supporters and sympathizers demanding tangible evidence from the Akufo-Addo Campaign, vis-à-vis whether, indeed, the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) actually met with Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, let alone the NPP General-Secretary’s report of Nana Akufo-Addo having “chided” Mr. Cameron for tying Britain’s foreign assistance to the respect for the fundamental human rights of homosexuals in commonwealth countries (See “Koku’s Demand for Proof of Nana-Cameron Meeting is Preposterous – NPP” MyJoyOnline.com 11/13/11).
Amusing because rather than call in the British High Commissioner to Ghana for a thorough dressing down on the issue, if, indeed, he felt so strongly about the same, what Ghanaians actually saw President John Evans Atta-Mills do, was to witness the pathetic and groggy figure of the latter uncomfortably standing in front of what clearly looked like a dully draped casket (the man is not called “Atta Mortuary Man” for nothing) and timidly and indirectly rail against the leaders of countries that presumed to be able to disdainfully use the truncheon of development aid to summarily disrupt the cultures and moral values of fellow sovereign states.
If this is what the major operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress and their supporters and sympathizers interpret to constitute the hallmark of courageous leadership, then the future development of Ghanaian diplomacy is very bleak indeed. To be certain, the farcical staging of his purported fury over the righteous demand by Prime Minister Cameron for the respect of the fundamental human rights of homosexuals, before television cameras, made the former University of Ghana Law School professor seem more comical than the immortalized Mr. Charlie Chaplin or, in Ghanaian theatrical vernacular Messrs. Bob Cole and Opia. It also brought the image of modern, postcolonial Ghana to the lowest level that it could ever reach.
But that the communications director of President Mills, the ever-bumbling Mr. Koku Anyidoho, should demand an audiotape evidence of that part of Nana Akufo-Addo’s meeting with Prime Minister Cameron, in which the former reportedly “chided” the latter for tying foreign assistance to Ghana and other African countries to gay and lesbian rights, is all the more to be pitied. It is almost as if Messrs. Atta-Mills and Akufo-Addo are being dared to indulge in a patently sophomoric and vacuous contest of foolery, to see which of the two leaders is more and better suited for the presidency, when, in fact, his egregious faux-pas in the Cameron episode has already put the slim majority of Ghanaians who voted for Tarkwa-Atta in the 2008 presidential run-off on the defensive and crestfallen with shame and utter embarrassment.
What is even more troubling is the fact that frontline government operatives like Mr. Anyidoho do not seem to even half-appreciate the glaring fact that it is Ghana’s national temperament and conscience that are at stake in the Cameron episode; and that the inescapably obtuse and myopic stance adopted by the National Democratic Congress may well have irreparably damaged the image and standing of Ghana in the proverbial international community.
The good news and emulative model of leadership which the Mills cohorts would do themselves and the rest of the country a lot of good to learn from, is the recent sentencing of a 22-year-old Ugandan man to 30 years imprisonment for killing Mr. David Kato, the celebrated and now-immortalized Kampala gay rights activist. In his defense, the murder convict, Mr. Sidney Nsubuga Enoch, admitted to having bludgeoned the victim to death with a hammer in January this year, because Mr. Kato had supposedly made sexual advances towards the killer.
What is significant to note here is that Uganda’s anti-gay movement is even more virulent and radical than its fast-growing Ghanaian counterpart. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, a seasoned guerilla fighter, has also taken the most intransigent of stances of any African leader on the continent, on the question of homosexuality. The question thus revolves around whether the Ghanaian judicial system, which has witnessed the most barbaric of ethnic cleansing under Mr. Rawlings’ P/NDC governments in the past, would be capable of delivering the kind of exemplary and deterrent justice meted Mr. Kato’s killer.

*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: [email protected].