By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I am not privy to the exact contents of the Multi-TV program on which Messrs. Akomea and Agyenim-Boateng are reported to have exchanged some uncomplimentary comments. Nonetheless, it is worth highlighting the fact that neither Mr. James Agyenim-Boateng, the Deputy Tourism Minister, nor Mr. Kojo Twum-Boafo, the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Free Zone Board, who now pretends to play the role of a neutral observer to the incident, is particularly known to be very gentlemanly in his public deportment as a radically rambunctious partisan of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC).
Indeed, barely a fortnight ago, Mr. Twum-Boafo served the public notice that he was determined to consistently and incessantly focus on unproven allegations linking the Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) to illegal drugs as a means of railroading the Akufo-Addo Campaign in the lead-up to Election 2012. The same Mr. Twum-Boafo, it must be noted, not very long ago, dispatched an E-mail to yours truly in which the writer naively attempted to finesse me into penning an editorial for his unnamed newspaper. To be frank with the reader, I came dangerously close to taking the bait, somehow, presuming the publisher/editor to be neutral to events on the Ghanaian political scene, or at least about the business of balanced journalism.
What prompted me to give the request a second look were the unpardonable mechanical and glaring grammatical errors contained therein. I would shortly discover to my utter disgust, after consulting with a close friend that, indeed, the writer/publisher posing as a neutral observer of Ghanaian politics was an inveterate opponent of the kind of Democratic Liberalism championed by Drs. Joseph Boakye-Danquah, the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, and Kofi Abrefa Busia and, of course, Mr. Dombo!
We also know, at least it is a fairly widely-held view, that Mr. James Agyenim-Boateng finds himself playing second-bananas in the Atta-Mills cabinet because in the wake of the 2008 electoral impasse, the young man led a phalanx of NDC thugs to the headquarters of the Electoral Commission to intimidate Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan and his diligent staff into prematurely announcing the results of the presidential runoff.
What is interesting about Mr. Twum-Boafo’s testimony is this partisan witness’ rather roguish attempt to imply that, somehow, Nana Akomea, the Communications Director of the Akufo-Addo Campaign, is absent-mindedly petulant. In other words, Nana Akomea may be suffering from what psychologists call “Attention Deficit Disorder.” And so we find Mr. Twum-Boafo, perhaps hell-bent on ingratiating himself with the Deputy Tourism Minister, harping on the fact of Nana Akomea reading text messages while partaking of a live TV talking-heads program.
The fact of the matter is that even if we decided to concur with Mr. Twum-Boafo that, indeed, Nana Akomea ought to have been more attentive to the program of, and on, which he was an active participant, the fact still remains, fortunately, that there were hundreds of spectators at home, and elsewhere, watching the program who could readily and far more objectively attest to the fact of whether, in fact, Mr. Agyenim-Boateng had called Nana Akomea’s gumption and that of the entire membership of the New Patriotic Party into question. So far, other than Mr. Twum-Boafo and diehard NDC partisans, not many members of the audience appear to be questioning the NPP Communications Director’s interpretation of Mr. Agyenim-Boateng’s allegedly insolent remark.
It is also quite certain that this is not the very first time that any key political operative has received and read text messages while a program on which he was an active participant was in progress. This is not, however, to even remotely endorse such clearly distracting practice.
*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 22 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected]. ###