The Coward Editors and Publishers of the “Informer” Newspaper

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

Ordinarily, I prefer to creatively rejoin scandalous articles penned and published by the pathologically incorrigible and decidedly neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist Trokosi Wing of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) against the presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), which is why I decided not to rather drily and unimaginatively caption this piece as follows: “Re: Akufo-Addo’s Anti-Ewe Agenda Rears Ugly Heads Again [sic]” (See Ghanaweb.com 10/26/12).

What makes my deliberately brief response to the trashy “Desk Report”/Editorial of the so-called Informer newspaper almost redundant, or absolutely pleonastic, is the fact that it is rather the latter rag’s editors and their terror-mongering executioner and criminal paymasters of the so-called National Democratic Congress who ought to be constantly reminded of their bloody political track-record of anti-Akan ethnic cleansing, horridly epitomized by their June 30, 1982 brutal assassination of the three Supreme Court Judges.

Curiously, not long ago, one of the backers and sympathizers of the Trokosi Butchers of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the equally bloody political matrix of the so-called National Democratic Congress, sought to “correct” me on the rather quaint question of whether Justices Koranteng-Addow, Agyepong and Sarkodie were, indeed, Ghanaian Supreme Court Judges or “common” High Court Judges. The obvious inference here, of course, was the suggestion that, somehow, the slain judges deserved their nightmarish fate because they were not quite as socially and institutionally significant as I had sought to portray them.

Anyway, we also significantly, albeit rather painfully, need to remind our dear readers and the impenitent Trokosi Nationalists, that a couple, or so, years ago, a rising star in Ghana’s judicial firmament from Akyem-Kukurantumi was brutally butchered in the Hohoe district of, you guessed right, the Volta Region, for what clearly appeared to be her non-Ewe ethnic identity. A relative of mine and my former high school English teacher who now sits on the Fast-Track Court, I understand, had reluctantly served as a judge in the same Hohoe district a decade earlier. “Reluctantly,” because Justice Adu-Ampomah had even refused to own a Hohoe mail-box; he would also spend most of his weekends among the safe confines of his own kinsmen and women across the Great River.

And so it is simply not clear precisely what the “Informer” newspaper editors mean, when they so hollowly accuse Mr. Atta-Akyea, the NPP-MP for Akyem-Abuakwa South and a crackerjack legal mind, of masterminding a rather lurid, ignoble and dastardly game of attempting to remove human remains from the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in order to criminally litter them across the Volta River and blame people like the Informer’s editors and publishers for literally executing NPP supporters and sympathizers in the Volta Region.

Well, in both 1992 and 1996, Ghanaians eerily awakened to widely circulated and credible rumors regarding several horrid incidents of the murder and persecution of ethnic Ewes who had had the temerity to either vote for or attempt to vote for the New Patriotic Party. It thus appears to me, therefore, that the foregoing flagrant acts of barbarism are what the editors and publishers of the “Informer” newspaper ought to be frontally addressing.

Then again, why would Mr. Atta-Akyea – both a schoolmate of mine and a cousin – so foolishly attempt to cause the heinous transportation of corpses (presumably those of the Ewe dead) from the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, in “faraway” Kumasi, when there are hospitals like Koforidua, Suhum, Kyebi, Begoro, Akwatia, Nkawkaw and Atibie, among a slew of others, littered all over the Eastern Region that could be more conveniently utilized for the purpose so viciously alleged by the Trokosi editors of the “Informer”? Eh, does this make sense to anybody but the NDC Trokosi Boys?

It is also rather laughable for anybody to seriously talk about Ewes massively losing their government-owned jobs, when it is rather the Tsikatas and the Rawlingses and their Ewe kinsfolk and cohorts who are widely known to have massively denied Ghanaians of Akan descent the opportunity of either securing civil service jobs for which they were professionally qualified, as well as being routinely prevented from being duly promoted to the same? Indeed, in 1998, I personally witnessed this poisonously pathological brand of Ewe fascism at the Kotoka International Airport, where almost each and every one of the Ghana Airways operatives who had any influential shot to call, as it were, was of Ewe descent. They often sported Akan names even while disdainfully pretending as if the Twi/Akan language was veritably an alien tongue!

If, indeed, Mr. Kennedy Agyepong, the NPP-MP from Assin-North, is the kind of terrorist that the editors and publishers of the Informer would have Ghanaians and the rest of the world believe, then this obviously explains why an Ewe woman could brazenly and happily lie supine and spread-eagle and rapturously consent to making at least four babies by this prime target of the inveterate animosity of the Trokosi Boys.

*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 “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected]. ###