On Kwesi Nyantakyi: Am I the only wise man in Ghana?

When the newly elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo reportedly ordered the prompt return of Mr. Kwasi Nyantakyi, then the most successful President of the Ghana Football Association (GFA), from his official FIFA trip to Morocco, then in a fierce battle with Britain, I believe, over the hosting of the World Cup, and Mr. Nyantakyi’s allegedly rather rude arrest and cuffing at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA), upon his return, I quickly penned and published an article on Modernghana.com., which also got published on some of the other major Ghanaian media websites, admonishing Nana Akufo-Addo to proceed on this most sensitive matter with extreme caution.

For whatever reasons it may be worth, I have my own take on this which I wouldn’t want to reveal at this moment, even former President John Agyekum-Kufuor was widely reported to have said that the Anas Aremeyaw Anas documentary was a must-see.

I dispatched this cautionary note to the President, because it was quite obvious to any critical thinker that the ultimate target of Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who had recently collaborated with former President John Dramani Mahama to seriously undermine the confidence of the Ghanaian people in the establishment of the judiciary and ruin the hard-earned reputation of some deliberately targeted individual judges, was Ghana’s former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, as well as the former New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa-South. There was also no clear-cut evidence that in seeking to so virulently bring the image, personality and reputation of Mr. Nyantakyi into abject disrepute, that Mr. Anas and his Tiger-Eye team of private investigators had sought clearance from the Chief of the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) or any of the relevant statutorily charged or mandated authorities.

Indeed, to-date, it is not even clear whether then-President John Dramani Mahama had the constitutional mandate to use the paid services of a private investigator such as Mr. Anas and his team, instead of the taxpayer-underwritten services of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service (GPS), and/or any of the other allied statutorily mandated criminal investigations agencies in the country for a sting operation against our judges and magistrates. I also had very strong suspicions that the real target of the Anas exposé, titled “Number 12,” was clearly President Akufo-Addo, who, in the documentary, was portrayed as a pathologically kick-back prone Ghanaian leader with absolutely no scruples, whatsoever, who was cheaply and eternally on the take and had absolutely no care or concern for the fortunes or status in the global ranking of Ghana’s senior National Soccer Team, the Black Stars.

This aspect of the Anas documentary was also precisely why I wanted Nana Akufo-Addo to be very careful of how he dealt with the Nyantakyi Affair. Now, Dear Reader, don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Mr. Nyantakyi was not a picture-perfect personality or sports administrator without any skeletons in his closet. But then, again, who among us is picture perfect? Still, I felt strongly that absolutely no forensically credible evidence or judicially sustainable case had been made or impregnably established against the longest-serving and the most progressive, dynamic and visionary President of the Ghana Football Association. You see, here we are living in Ghana with Mr. Nyantakyi’s being the first GFA President to take the Black Stars to the World Cup and have the latter put up a world-class performance, such that even though the Stars did not advance very far in the tournament, nevertheless, it had become inescapably clear to the rest of the global community that going forth, the Ghana Black Stars was the team to watch in the near future.

It was also under the watch of Mr. Nyantakyi that the GFA became a bonanza establishment for talented professional soccer players in the country. In short, Mr. Nyantakyi was the man to envy and possibly target for elimination and replacement.

After all, hadn’t the stentorian calls gone out, at least since five years before, that it was about time The Midas Man gave way for another man/woman to also get the chance to enjoy the generous perks that came with the job. Now, it turns out that all the talk of the dismissed FIFA and CAF executive’s being thoroughgoing corrupt and standing in the way of the Black Stars’ chances of lifting the World Cup, the Nobel Prize of Association Football, was just hot air from the most fetid mouths of the most jealous and envious soccer gossips in the country, and the latter’s cold-calculating but savvy scheming political scumbags in England and elsewhere.

Needless to say, Kwasi Nyantakyi’s collusive and collaborative or symphonic destruction had a heavily racist tinge to it that Anas could not have been sophisticated and savvy enough to have espied beforehand and promptly squelched, by flatly rejecting the alleged “Thirty Pieces of Silver” paid this scandalously naïve former colonial subject by his imperious former slave masters. Now, the proverbial cat is out of the bag. FIFA has just released a report predictably indicating, at least by my own lights, that a forensic auditing of GFA accounts had only drawn up the insubstantial demons and ghosts of Messrs. Ahmed Suale and John Dramani Mahama; and one may logically and aptly add, the soon-to-be-ghost, professionally speaking, of Mr. Anas Aremeyaw (See “FIFA Forensic Audit of Ghana FA Found No Corruption Against Kwesi[sic] Nyantakyi” GhanaSoccerNet.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/27/19).

For now, the most logical question to ask is: Why has the Executive Committee of the GFA’s FIFA-authorized or supervised Normalization Committee been, reportedly, sitting on this FIFA finding for some two months now? This is the question whose answer I promptly want to know. I mean, right now!

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York