Nana Akufo-Addo should not have gone that unhelpful way

The most relevant response to critics, largely from the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the left-leaning allies of the latter, who accuse President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of having packed his government chockfull with family and friends is to tersely and poignantly riposte that he could not have formed his very successful government with political opponents and downright detractors and plain enemies from the membership roll of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), just as previous NDC presidents, including Mr. John Dramani Mahama, have absolutely no track-record of having formed their cabinet and government with key operatives of the then-opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) – (See “I Didn’t Hear Family & Friends ‘Noise’ When Ofori-Atta Was Raising 2016 Campaign Funds – Akufo-Addo” MyNewsGh.com 12/16/19).

In other words, such proposition is both a philosophical and a political absurdity. And while, indeed, every credible and sustainable democratic culture thrives on membership diversity, nevertheless, it is talent, academic and professional qualifications, that matter in the selection of eligible candidates for recruitment and appointments into all cabinet and executive or administrative portfolios. Consequently, the primary yardstick for measuring the composition of the key operatives of the Akufo-Addo-led Administration of the New Patriotic Party ought to be squarely based on the comparative performance of these cabinet and executive appointees vis-à-vis their predecessors.

In other words, it would be far more fruitful and profitable to talk about the fact of whether the Akufo-Addo appointees are better or more efficient in their various respective portfolios than their counterparts in the previous John Dramani Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress or not.

And so far, it well appears that Nana Akufo-Addo is running a far more efficient and productive government than was run by his predecessor. For starters, while the economy may not be completely out of the woods, as it were, nevertheless, the inflationary rate is better controlled and more stable presently than it has ever been over the past decade. Which also means that the present Akufo-Addo Administration has, so far, outperformed the tandem regimes of Presidents John Evans Atta-Mills, late, and John Dramani Mahama.

As for the question of why no criticisms were raised or voiced out while Mr. Kenneth Ofori-Atta served as primary fundraiser for the 2016 Akufo-Addo Presidential Campaign, this is best directed to the internal political detractors of Nana Akufo-Addo, and not critics from the main opposition National Democratic Congress who, really, could not have cared less about who the fundraiser of Candidate Akufo-Addo was or had been in the leadup to the 2016 Presidential Election.

Interestingly, what captured my attention on the fundraiser question was the imperative need for Parliament and the Electoral Commission to establish a mechanism for ensuring that the campaign finances of all legitimately registered political parties are monitored and periodically audited for the benefit of the general public, especially regarding perfectly legitimate questions of the funding sources of these political parties, if official corruption is to be significantly reduced to the barest minimum.

I have, indeed, observed the following before and hereby reprise the same, which is that in order for questions of nepotism or friends and family governments to ring relevant and logically worth the query, our historians and political scientists, as well as our investigative journalists, need to draw up credible lists of all the key players of the previous regimes, beginning with former President Jerry John Rawlings, through the tenure of Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor and Messrs. John Evans Atta-Mills and John Dramani Mahama, and then we could objectively compare those with the ethnic composition of the present government.

And then, for good measure, we could also critically examine the representation of Akyem-descended cabinet appointees in those previous governments, and then and then only could we obtain a fair chance of passing the most meaningful judgments on the ethnic composition of the Akufo-Addo Administration. Short of the preceding exercise, any talk or criticism vis-à-vis the composition of the Akufo-Addo government would be tantamount to nothing short of the purely anecdotal or the patently insubstantial, as well as inconsequential.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

E-mail: [email protected]