In His Hustings to Become Ghana's President

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



I have been trying extremely hard to resist the oafish NDC-Ewe sideshow that has been swirling in the wake of Nana Akufo-Addo’s presidential campaign for Election 2012. The latest of such circus act is titled “If Rawlings Smoked WEE and Became Ghana’s President…” (Ghanaweb.com 8/7/11).

In the aforementioned article which, by the way, I barely had the stomach to partially peruse, the barely articulate writer clearly does not seem to half-appreciate exactly what is so irreparably and unpardonably damning about the New Patriotic Presidential Candidate that he wants, presumably, his NDC-Ewe clansmen and women to hold against the former Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa South come Election 2012.

For starters, it is one thing to accuse Nana Akufo-Addo of personally using and/or abusing illegal drugs. It is a different species of quadruped altogether to claim, in fact, that not only does Ghana’s former Justice and Foreign minister take illegal drugs but even more flagrantly, that, indeed, Nana Akufo-Addo is a “drug pusher.” In essence, what the writer of the article alluded to above is claiming is that he has in his possession forensic evidence indicating that, indeed, Nana Akufo-Addo is in the regular and habitual business of selling drugs to other people besides himself. For consistently, the latter impression is what the writer seeks to publicly project. If this observation has hermeneutical validity, then I see absolutely no reason why the Akufo-Addo Legal Team needs any further evidence before vigorously pursuing a libel suit against this NDC-Ewe clinical hatemonger.

I am personally not in the habit of reading the largely poorly edited and desultory journalistic fare of this “motor-mouth” of a writer because, by and large, almost every single issue that this butterball attempts to address epically falls flat on its prat, as it were – the reason may well have something to do with the dietary ingredients of his menu growing up. We had dozens of his kind living on my great-grandfather’s cocoa, oil-palm and rubber plantations growing up, so I pretty much know exactly what I am talking about.

Anyway, recently, this SOB had the temerity to sneeringly accuse the dauphin of the former President Edward Akufo-Addo of “going (out) on the hustings” (now, that is the grammatical expression of the phrase) or even “prowling the hustings” and “eating the people’s food.” Precisely “which people” was the NDC-Ewe journeyman alluding to, but Nana Akufo-Addo’s own clansmen and women in the Central Region?

You see, as a highly civilized ethnic nationality, we, Akans, do not eat where we are not cordially and heartily invited. And the brazen outsider-accuser would have done himself and his paymasters a lot of good, had he humbly recognized the age-old fact that among our people an “OHUANI” or “HUANIN” hails from the Volta Region, not any of the five Akan-dominated regions of our beloved country. Well, if that sorry-assed and shameless Gaddhafy propagandist wants to play hardball, as New Yorkers are wont to say, by all means, let him be my guest!

For those of you who still remember, the last time that I got this bastard in the crook of my arm, he scurried pathetically into the Ghanaweb.com chat-room and cut and pasted some guff and turd, posted largely by some anonymous chat-room junkies, and presented the same to his audience as his incontrovertible proof of my abject lack of credibility. Talk of diffidence and clinical lunacy!

Anyway, exactly what does it mean for a politician to be said to have “gone out on the hustings”? Well, for the NDC-Ewe hatemonger’s personal edification, historically, the hustings referred to a campaign platform on which newly nominated British parliamentary candidates stood to render their acceptance speeches. Thus it is only an NDC-Ewe troglodyte like this inveterate Akufo-Addo hater who would construct such a fatuous phrase as “in his [i.e. Akufo-Addo’s] hustings to become Ghana’s President at the 2012 polls.”

And, by the way, nobody can become “President at the 2012 polls.” You can only become President after trouncing – or defeating – your opponents at the polls. Indeed, I sometimes wonder how such an obviously congenital dullard could gain admission into Ghana’s third-finest university, at Cape Coast, while I could only barely be considered for admission (with the remarkable likes of David Dontoh and J. C. deGraft, Jr.) into the University of Ghana’s School for the Performing Arts which, by the way, I never got to attend.

As for his patently imbecilic idea that the man who has been doing penance in Somalia to atone for his brutal assassination of the Akan Supreme Court judges is, somehow, head-and-shoulders above Nana Akufo-Addo on the Ghanaian political landscape, the least written about it here in riposte the better. Suffice it to say, at least in passing, that Nana Akufo-Addo has been at the forefront of Ghana’s human rights and democracy movements, with the likes of Adu-Boahen, Sam Okudzeto and even the erratic Kwesi Pratt and my cousin Kweku Baako, since the days of the People’s Movement for Freedom and Justice (PMFJ) in the Acheampong era, and not the Alliance for Change era, as the critic would have his readers believe.

Indeed, not even former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, who personally served in Mr. Rawlings’ PNDC cabinet, as Secretary for Local Government, could be justifiably described as having “lurked in the shadow of Rawlings.” But, of course, for NDC-Ewe welfare-check (cheque) recipients like Dr. Fiafito, Rawlings is the biggest thing that ever happened to postcolonial Ghanaian politics. Greater than the architectural designer of the Repeal of the Criminal Libel Code, which marks the real beginning of Fourth-Republican Ghanaian democracy, you say? “Azuuii!” a buddy of mine would have retorted.



*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and author of 22 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].

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