Prof. Ransford Yaw Gyampo
He may be Head of European Studies in the Political Science Department at Ghana’s premier and/or flagship academy, but I am quite certain that when Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May or France’s President Emmanuel Macron needs pointers on good governance, her/his first port of call is not the Legon office of Prof. Ransford Yaw Gyampo.
In other words, I would rather that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo solicited first-class and first-hand or authoritative opinions on how best to move our country ahead and at the fastest and most pragmatic pace from either political scientists with research and andragogical focus on Ghana and/or Africana Studies, than from a quixotically self-infatuated academic with absolutely no well-recognized credentials or achievements in his sub-disciplinary area.
At best, Prof. Gyampo is a nuisance who is of absolutely no relevance to the Akufo-Addo Administration where local issues of governance are concerned, unless the intemperate and vitriolic critic wants to contribute to the foreign-policy discourse of this present government.
It also clearly appears that Prof. Gyampo does not have much work to do in his chosen discipline of European Studies, thus his constant peevish badgering of the key operatives of unarguably the most progressive Administration of Ghana’s Fourth Republic (See “Akufo-Addo Means Well But He Is Not a Leader – Prof. Gyampo” Ghanaweb.com 1/9/19).
It is also quite obvious that Prof. Gyampo has absolutely no respectable or worthwhile knowledge or idea of what the real stuff of leadership is made of, thus his rather lame, outrageously asinine and criminally scandalous comparison between President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and the Woyome-shilling President John Evans Atta-Mills, late. You see, it is true that the latter may very well have thought that he meant well for the country when he stood beside the infamous mega-thief and pontifically asserted that Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome owed absolutely not a pesewa to the Ghanaian taxpayer or our National Treasury.
But this ardent Akufo-Addo critic cannot point to a single major achievement notched by the Atta-Mills-led government of the National Democratic (NDC) that even half-favorably compares with Nana Akufo-Addo’s fee-free Senior High School policy initiative, and the Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, which was crafted and opportunely enacted while Nana Akufo-Addo served as former President John Agyekum-Kufuor’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice and Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa South.
The critic may also do well to examine the resonant success that is the Planting for Food and Jobs agricultural policy agenda, which yours truly has personally dubbed “Feed Ghana!” and compare the same to what prevailed under the tenures of each and every one of the four previous democratically elected leaders of Ghana’s Fourth Republic. In nearly every major sector of our nation’s socioeconomic and geopolitical landscape, the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party could be clearly seen to have made remarkable improvements; and so it is not clear just what policy indicators or development programs and projects Prof. Gyampo has both been reading and looking at. Even his own bread-and-butter-making institution, the University of Ghana, is better run today, under the masterful leadership of Vice-Chancellor Ebenezer Oduro-Owusu – my old and venerable PERSCO classmate – than the same institution was run under the tandem regimes of Messrs. Atta-Mills and John Dramani Mahama.
In the area of the progressive and practical application of modern technology as a development tool of government and good governance, even as Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia had occasion to highlight recently, much that is efficiently unprecedented has been achieved and continues to be achieved. But, perhaps, it is also significant to point out that Prof. Gyampo’s idea of what constitutes good leadership primitively verges on tyranny. You see, merely intimidating one’s ministerial appointees into servile docility, such as the critic claims to have prevailed under the tenure of former President Jerry John Rawlings, did not either remarkably grow Ghana’s economy or prevent cabinet appointees of Mr. Rawlings from literally selling themselves state-owned real-estate and landed properties at giveaway prices. Is Prof. Gyampo so midnight-blind as to fail to recognize such acts of wanton theft for what they inescapably were? As well, does the critic fail to recognize that whipping his ministerial and executive minions into line had not prevented Chairman Rawlings from running the economy effectively aground as to force his successor, former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, into the IMF-World Bank-sponsored HIPC (or Highly Indebted Poor Countries) Program?
The deadly and criminal implementation of the cutthroat Darwinian Cash-and-Carry healthcare policy did not reflect the sort of emulative leadership that Prof. Gyampo would have Ghanaians envisage in former President Rawlings. You see, he may not want to hear this, but the fact of the matter is that none of the three National Democratic Congress-sponsored leaders of Ghana’s Fourth Republic favorably compares with the competence, dynamism and visionary zeal of Nana Akufo-Addo. With regard to former President John Agyekum-Kufuor whose government even Chairman Rawlings firmly believed was the most corrupt at the time, more corruption allegations were levelled against members of the Kufuor Administration than the present Akufo-Addo Administration. Mr. Kufuor did little to allay the anxieties and concerns of the Ghanaian citizenry, when he cavalierly retorted that corruption was as old as Adam and Eve. Still, it is quite refreshing to learn that not a single one of the former Kufuor cabinet appointees taken to court by the latter’s successor, to wit, President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, on charges of corruption, was found to be guilty of the same.
I guess what I am clearly asserting here is that oftentimes, in Ghana, the overwhelming majority of corruption allegations brought against incumbent cabinet appointees, as well as former cabinet appointees, often end up being proven in court to be sheer chimera or the work of the jaundiced imagination of their political opponents.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]