By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I don’t know that the circumstances under which Nana Akufo-Addo left Oxford University has any more relevance to the well-meaning Ghanaian voter than the fact that Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome continues to illegally keep the GH? 52 million taken from the Ghanaian taxpayer under false pretences, with the complicity of highly placed cabinet members of the Mahama government. Or the still unrevealed circumstances under which the University of London-educated President John Evans Atta-Mills perished at the Osu castle on July 24, 2012 (See “Akufo-Addo Left Oxford Under Strange Circumstances – Tsatsu Tsikata” Ghanaweb.com 11/22/12).
Rather, what the NDC pressure group, the so-called Research and Advocacy Platform (RAP) ought to be doing is to be informing Ghanaian voters about the great damage that Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata has done to our beloved country’s economy with his much-vaunted Oxford University graduate education, besides stealing huge sums of taxpayer money while he “served” as Managing-Director of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), under the stewardship of President Jeremiah John Rawlings, the self-righteous apostle of “probity, accountability and justice.”
I mean, it is really only in Ghana that a convicted criminal like Mr. Tsikata can presume to impugn the credibility and integrity of his moral superiors and be granted an on-air prime-time audience. What is rather amusing here, though, is the fact that the RAP operative who has been relentlessly leading this charge against the New Patriotic Party presidential candidate is a hustler who has been effectively disowned and ostracized by his church-owning and running family, and has even been summarily prohibited from using his own family’s name. Instead, you guessed right, the damn urchin has flagrantly chosen to impersonate my tragically immortalized granduncle, Barima Ohemeng – aka Nana Akyea-Mensah – of Akyem-Apedwa, brother of Nana Yaa Amponsaa, the eponymous inspiration of modern Ghanaian highlife music. Are we still talking about “credibility” and “integrity,” folks?!
Anyway, the question of whether Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was expelled from Oxford University or not is clearly beside the point. What is significantly worth knowing about the man is the fact that as a trial lawyer, Nana Akufo-Addo has distinguished himself far more and better than the criminally convicted Mr. Tsikata, whose record as a law lecturer at the University of Ghana has been known to clearly lack the path-breaking leverage and imprimatur of Nana Akufo-Addo’s, on both the national and international scene.
Needless to say, if, indeed, Mr. Tsikata – who also once claimed that Dr. J. B. Danquah owed his fame to his imprisonment and assassination by President Kwame Nkrumah – has any forensic evidence incriminating or grievously blighting the integrity and reputation of Ghana’s former Attorney-General and Justice Minister, while Nana Akufo-Addo was a student at Oxford University, let him boldly and forthwith reveal the same and stop his vacuous bluster.
At any rate, what is doubtlessly clear is that absolutely nobody is claiming that Nana Akufo-Addo wasted any Government or public funds by being academically disengaged from the University of Oxford, assuming that, in fact, he was. And so what is the palaver here, if I may so cast the same, other than sheer and raw envy on the part of his inveterate political opponents and ideological detractors?
Then also, who said that, like anybody else, Nana Akufo-Addo has absolutely no right to put his proverbial best foot forward, by editing and presenting his professional profile in a way that he deems to appropriately and accurately reflect his achievements or the lack thereof, for that matter?
It also goes without saying that the profile of voters in staunch support of the presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party is hugely different from that of the supporters of the judicial assassins of the Mahama-led so called National Democratic Congress. In brief, if I were Mr. Tsikata (Twereduampong-Totrobonsu forbid!) and his fellow criminal convicts of the NDC, I would be more worried about “Scandal Woyome” and the morally tainted and emotionally troubled Mr. John Dramani Mahama, the largely absentee former Vice-President who, according to Attorney-General Martin Amidu, was being financially investigated by the mysteriously demised President Mills for grand larceny, involving the purchasing of some five, or so, military aircraft, at the time of my dear Uncle Tarkwa-Atta’s death.
Needless to say, if, indeed, it turns out that he had suspected that staying at Oxford for as long as Mr. Tsikata did could turn him into a thief and a criminal convict like the latter, then, of course, Nana Akufo-Addo was the wiser for leaving!
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York Nov. 22, 2012 ###