By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Americans have a saying that: “What goes around comes around.” This maxim pretty much underscores the law of the boomerang. And so I could not help but snort at Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa’s new-found grandstand or farcical moral authority on the raging discourse on the politics of insult (See “Ablakwa Bemoans ‘Verbal Pornography’ in Ghana Politics” MyJoyOnline.com 7/30/11).
As I have already observed in another article, Ghanaian politics has known no other language than that of abuse and what the Deputy Information Minister prefers to characterize as the politics of “verbal pornography.” Who said that even a government almost wholly composed of clinical dullards – or what one of its own key operatives termed as “Team-C Players” – is not without its fair share of quite imaginative doggerel smiths?
Indeed, it would have been nothing short of the outright laudable, had Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa’s plaint come from another mouth and/or another National Democratic Congress quarter altogether. To be certain, so piqued was my interest that I had to immediately Google the name of the Deputy Information Minister and pair it with that of Nana Akufo-Addo, the Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). I faintly recalled that incident in which Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa had riposted to a charge made against his party’s leadership by Nana Akufo-Addo with the shockingly raunchy image of a “bikini.”
Fortunately, bingo!, there it was in an article captioned “Akufo-Addo Uses ‘Bikini Statistics’ – Okudzeto-Ablakwa” and dated June 18, 2011. In the article, the NPP flagbearer had vehemently decried the rapid degeneration of the Ghanaian economy and satirically concluded that, indeed, the NDC was about the patently ungodly business of creating “a poverty-owning democracy” in Ghana. Needless to say, the latter was in direct response to the perennial NDC teaser that the NPP, whose motto is fostering “a property-owning democracy,” is wholly composed of con-artists and robber barons.
Well, now most Ghanaian voters know that the latter characterization more strikingly reflects the behavior of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress.
Anyway, in the bikini incident, this is what the Deputy Information Minister had to say: “Nana Addo’s statistics [from the Gallup Polls, regarding the precipitous decline of the country’s economy] is like a bikini – what it reveals is suggestive, but what it conceals is vital.” Needless to say, one does not need to stretch one’s imagination to appreciate its unmistaken pornographic implications.
And so it is rather amusing for Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa to characterize Mr. John Kumah’s retaliatory salvo suggesting the plausible homosexuality of President Mills as utterly “disgusting, distasteful [and] absolutely scandalous,” while implicitly and ironically suggesting that, indeed, it is perfectly alright for Mr. Felix Kwakye Ofosu, the NDC’s functional equivalent of Mr. Kumah, to impugn the heterosexuality of Nana Akomea, the Communications Director of the Akufo-Addo Campaign.
It is also insuperably hypocritical for Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa to have expected members of the NPP to roundly condemn Mr. Kumah, the coordinator of the party’s youth wing, the Young Patriots, when in reality no such condemnation had been unleashed at Nana Akomea’s verbal assailant by key members of the NDC.
It is also not clear what Mr. Kwesi Pratt means when he opines that it is high time “the nation distinguished between insults and unverifiable attacks and stop rewarding people for misbehaving,” since, to-date, it is only President John Evans Atta-Mills who is widely known to reward such cabinet appointees as Dr. Hannah Bissiw and Mr. Kobby Acheampong, when they hurl verbal vitriol at their political opponents.
As for Mr. Raymond Archer’s call on the President “not to interfere with the work of [a highly politicized and functionally erratic] police [in the arbitrary arrests of opposition activists who use language unflattering to Ghana’s Chief-of-State],” we can only infer from Mr. Archer’s dire need to pleasing his boss and proprietor of the Enquirer newspaper, Mr. Ato Ahwoi. Incidentally the latter, who is also head of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, is in the process of suing Mr. Kumah for suggestively impugning Mr. Ahwoi’s sexuality in an on-air verbal riposte.
Anyway, as one of my Danquah Institute (DI) colleagues jovially suggested, Mr. Ahwoi stands a far greater chance of winning a lawsuit against his own muckraking Enquirer newspaper than against a self-defending Mr. Kumah.
*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and author of 22 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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