What Retraction Are You Talking About, "My Friend"?

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

Well, my attention has been drawn to my reference to an article that I initially came across on the Modernghana.com website under my name captioned "Nana Akufo-Addo To Listen To Only Two Voices Out Of The Four." Naturally, I promptly fired off a disclaimer in which I painstakingly explained why yours truly could not have been the author of such an article. I also protested to the editors of Modernghana.com where it apparently had first been published.

Several hours later, I received an apologetic note from the editors of Modernghana.com stating that an editorial error had been committed on their part, in having my name appended to the afore-referenced article which they then acknowledged had not been authored by me. As I vividly recall, I never accused the eventually certified author of the Akufo-Addo article at issue of having impersonated me in the past. What I had emphatically stated in my disclaimer was that in the heated lead-up to Election 2008, another article whose author had rather mischievously impersonated me had mordantly lit into the economic policy manifesto of Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom of the Progressive People's Party (PPP).

I also clearly suggested that in that particular instance, I had strongly suspected somebody who ran an Accra-based think tank of being the cowardly author. Then also, I had confided to Mr. Sydney Casely-Hayford, the well-known media proprietor and financial analyst, then resident in the Washington, DC-Maryland metropolitan area, that I had not authored the Nduom-lambasting article but had not found it necessary to follow through with a disclaimer. I wasn't going to let another opportunity to freeze such dastardly mischief to slip by this time around.

For the record, I personally emailed the editors of Modernghana.com, after I had already dispatched my disclaimer to several other media websites, where my articles also regularly appear, to go ahead and publish the same, together with an explanation for the apparent glitch that had occurred. Evidently, they appear not to have complied with the latter advisory which is standard media procedure; I have been a newspaper editor and been writing and publishing for some three decades now, and so anybody's self-preening claim to being much older than I am is decidedly irrelevant here.

Now, talking about "hallucinations," did the person accusing me of the latter do any sleuthing to ascertain the cause of my admittedly vehement disclaimer? And so, really, who is hallucinating here? I am not averse to a good fight; I only pick my battles on the basis of relevance and edification or teachability. And I intend to maintain this policy strictly as such.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 31, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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