When Murderers, Thieves and Thugs Libel Akufo Addo

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

Just several days ago, a nondescript group of shameless thugs, graffiti artists and gangsters ran an editorial on Ghanaweb.com parading as the maiden editorial of some newly established rug called The True Statesman, not to be confused with the Akufo-Addo-founded and more erudite and urbane Statesman newspaper. I supposed then, and even now, that the main objective of the so-called True Statesman was to simply confuse an unsuspecting Ghanaian reading public. Fat chance!
And predictably, just today (12/10/11), these National Democratic Congress-sponsored scumbag rug operatives decided to libel the New Patriotic Party’s presidential candidate with the news flash of an article sensationally captioned “Nana Addo’s Man Busted in Geneva” (See Spyghana.com).
The story is about a 27-year-old Ghanaian by the name of Sam Yaw Manford – forget about the fact that the latter’s surname sounds more like someone from the same village as President John Evans Atta-Mills than a Kyebi brat – who was allegedly busted for the possession of one-hundred-and-eighty (180) grams of cocaine as far back as October 12, 2011, at the Geneva Airport in Switzerland.
What is rather fishy about the article, first of all, is the fact that it took so long for the Akufo-Addo-hating, nation-wrecking publishers of the True Statesman to uncover and disseminate their muck. Then we are also told by the same scam-artists of the True Statesman that, in fact, Mr. Sam Yaw Manford, the criminal cocaine suspect, had arrived in Geneva from Madrid, Spain, on an Iberian Airlines flight rather than, say, the Kotoka International Airport.
The story gets even more associatively absurd when the reader is told that Mr. Manford has absolutely nothing in common with the NPP presidential candidate, except for the clearly tenuous fact that Mr. Manford also happens to be “a close associate of [a Mr.] Raymond Amankwa who is a brother-in-law of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections.”
Perhaps somebody ought to enlighten the media neophytes of the so-called True Statesman that when a presidential election coincides with a parliamentary (and regional and district assembly) election, it is called a “general election.”
Anyway, the most ludicrous aspect of the story is the facile implication that, somehow, if a female relative of yours happens to be married to a convicted “drug baron,” then, automatically, that also makes you a convicted drug dealer. No associative nexus could be at once more patently false and criminally absurd.
But just wait, dear reader, until you learn to your delightful disdain that while, indeed, Mr. Manford’s passport number is intimately given as H 2472190, nonetheless, the publishers and reporters of the True Statesman have no photograph or even a mug shot of the arrestee and therefore have to run their nauseatingly obscene story alongside the picture of Nana Akufo-Addo.
Anyway, the scum-scrawling hustlers of the True Statesman want their readers to know that “Sam Manford is only a courier and [that] the Swiss authorities are working [around the clock] to track down the NPP politicians involved in the drug smuggling operation.”
As the saying goes: We shall be watching religiously, of course. Still, the fact that National Democratic Congress drug barons are far more likely to be behind the details of this operation cannot be readily discounted, even as the ruling party’s own pontiff and incumbent president, John Evans Atta-Mills, had occasion to profusely confess to American diplomats stationed in Accra, via the almighty Wikileaks, practically none of the NDC-appointed customs officers at the Kotoka Airport can be trusted with even a spoonful of granulated sugar!

*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 “Selected Political Writings” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].
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