Missing Certificate Or Not, Kpegah will Be Punished!

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

The latest tack of his reprobate detractors has been to claim that the Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) for elections 2008 and 2012 has reported in documents seeking to put paid to Mr. Francis Yaonasu Kpegah's allegation of professional impersonation of having misplaced the certificate confirming Nana Akufo-Addo's call to the Ghanaian bar some 42 years ago (See "Akufo-Addo's Law Certificate Is Not Missing - Lawyers" Ghanaweb.com 4/9/13).

The rather tacky and obvious implication here is that, somehow, Mr. Kpegah has a tinge of merit to his unpardonably outrageous allegation impugning the moral and professional integrity of Nana Akufo-Addo. The real test of the latter's integrity, of course, inheres in his legal performance record; and so far, Mr. Kpegah appears to be far more interested in documents bearing the name and/or signature of Nana Akufo-Addo, than highlighting any instances of flagrant legal malpractice that might have given the accuser any genuine cause to be suspicious of the credentials of Lawyer Akufo-Addo.

The problem for the former Rawlings appointee to the Supreme Court of Ghana is that Mr. Kpegah does not seem to be able to make up his mind as to whether, indeed, Nana Akufo-Addo is either impersonating a Mr. W. E. D. Akufo-Addo or is impersonating somebody else other than the latter. This is the veritable credibility gap that the Hohoe native's largely Anlo-Ewe supporters ought to focus their attention on, rather than what the enviably distinguished trial lawyer and former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice was engaged in, privately or professionally, between 1967 and 1971.

In essence, if his political detractors have any incriminating evidence spanning the foregoing period, let them publicly disclose the same and stop being petty and intellectually and morally bankrupt. Maybe his evidently cognitively addled detractors ought to be informed of the fact that even if Nana Akufo-Addo were to have misplaced his bar certification diploma, all that it would take to have the same replaced is to simply swear an affidavit confirming the fact that, indeed, Ghana's former Foreign Minister is the same W. E. D. Akufo-Addo whose name appears on the Roll of Ghanaian Lawyers as No. 1190.

And if Mr. Kpegah wants to challenge the preceding process of authentication also, all that he needs to do is to produce the Anlo-Ewe-descended Akufo-Addo whom he would have the global community believe the former Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa South has been impersonating for some 42 years.

Personally, I believe that about the only way for Mr. Kpegah to escape judicial sanction is for the former Acting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana to clinically undergo psychiatric examination and be professionally certified to be afflicted with some sort of dementia or personality disorder (See "Punish Kpegah - Akufo-Addo Tells Court" Daily Guide 4/8/13).

In terms of punishment, I am thinking about the possibility of Mr. Kpegah being prohibited from using the august title of "Retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana." And if he has any financial entitlements, the court may well decide to take some of it away from Mr. Kpegah in order to compensate Nana Akufo-Addo for the deliberate damage and pain done to both his reputation and person.

You see, even as I write, I don't remember where I have stored my high school certificates and undergraduate diplomas, honors and awards. And so does this mean that I never attended high school or graduated from college?

What bothers me about the repulsively infantile attempt by Mr. Kpegah and his fellow anti-Akufo-Addo detractors is the abjectly low image of Ghana that their actions are portraying to the global community. And it is precisely because of this reason that I am fully conviced that the then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah egregiously erred in not heeding Dr. Danquah's advice that for Ghana to progress and develop at all levels of endeavor, we (bona fide Ghanaians) needed to allow our Anlo-Ewe "hostages" to join their kinsfolk in Togo.

In effect, working assiduously towards Ewe secession from Ghana ought to be the top priority of all patriotic and peace-loving Ghanaians. Apples and oranges do not often mix tastefully. Nkrumah ought to have put the salutary destiny of Ghana over and above his vaultng pan-Africanist ambitions; at least until the bulk of our primeval continent's denizens were ready for a more organic socioeconomic, political and cultural unification. "Ako-Adjei Adi Y'awu Ampa!"

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 10, 2013
E-mail: [email protected].
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