Value is relative, and so I shall not waste much time in quibbling over whether Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jr., was a fool or otherwise for refusing to quit practicing journalism by accepting political appointments, first, from President John Agyekum-Kufuor, and then from President John Evans Atta-Mills. I know several trained journalists who downed their tools and accepted political appointments, obviously because they had come to the realization that theirs was a dead-end profession, or the financial dustbowl that is the lot of many an average Ghanaian journalist seemed to have made it necessary for them to enter into the relative gold mine that is postcolonial Ghanaian politics in order to make ends meet (See “Some of my Friends Think I am a Fool” (Adomonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/31/16).
In the case of the Editor-Publisher of the so-called Insight newspaper, the exit vista (not visa, by the way) may not have been that clear; for having been widely rumored to have inherited printing-press equipment originally owned by Mr. Chris Asher, gratis, from the Rawlings regime, the late flamboyant hard-hitting investigative journalist – many of his elite readers envisaged Mr. Asher to be more of a muckraker than a professionally objective investigative journalist – Mr. Pratt may well have been one of the prime beneficiaries of the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), and definitely a prime beneficiary of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), also headed by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings. Mr. Pratt has also been known to have served as a strategic decoy for both Rawlings-led juntas; and so he cannot be aptly described as a low-end Ghanaian journalist by any means.
And in the post-1992 democratic political dispensation, particularly in the wake of the private media explosion that characterized this era, Mr. Pratt appears to have made himself quite a decent living – some say even a considerable fortune – as a talk-radio and a television talking-heads fixture. Like yours truly, Mr. Pratt is very expressive and loquacious; which means that a diplomatic appointment, such as that of Ghana’s Ambassador to Cuba, which he claims to have turned down from President John Evans Atta-Mills, would not have done him much good. To be certain, the position may well have been offered as a tactical means of silencing this very vocal and fairly highly regarded journalist, at least throughout most of the 1980s and the lower-half of the 1990s.
It is not clear what sort of political appointments he had in mind, when then-President Agyekum-Kufuor allegedly threw out an invitation to Mr. Pratt. But it seems to make quite a logical sense for the man who introduced Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, the ardent Nkrumaist entrepreneur, into his cabinet to also think of extending a similar gesture to a rabidly Nkrumaist Mr. Pratt. One opportunistic journalist, a little older than Mr. Pratt but from the same district – I use the latter word loosely – in the Central Region took the political plunge and made it big. And today, that former AFRC/PNDC shill and Chief Propagandist owns a university college that dubiously claims curricular-wise, to be the foremost Afrocentric tertiary academy on the African continent.
And so clearly, it is a simple matter of perspective. I sincerely don’t know that Mr. Pratt has made any yeomanly or patriotic sacrifices to warrant his impugnation of those young graduates whose first objective, just out of college, is to go into politics in order to feed fat on the public dole. But I definitely believe that he has every right to impugn the rascally motives of such opportunistic upstarts. There is a slew of them in the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress. But then, so has Mr. Pratt been widely rumored to be on the payroll of the Mahama government, and on the free-gas consignment list of the Flagstaff House. And so, really, what is new here?
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