By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
There is an article circulating on the Internet titled "Nana Akufo Addo To Listen To Only Two Voices Out Of The Four," which has been attributed to me. I wish to emphatically and categorically deny that I have either written or caused to be published any such vitriolic and primitive article (See Modernghana.com 1/25/14). I never write Nana Akufo-Addo's name without a hyphen, as appears in the caption of the afore-referenced article. I also have a clear idea of who the evidently clinically delirious author of the said article is; for this is not the very first time that I have been so viciously and unconscionably impersonated by the same author who, by the way, runs a nondescript think tank somewhere in Ghana which operates more like a political party campaign machinery than an institution of serious scholars and researchers.
In the lead-up to Election 2008, the same writer put my name above an intemperate article that he had written attacking the ideological leanings of Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, then the presidential candidate of the Convention People's Party (CPP), using a gmail address. At the time in question, I had no gmail address, and so that readily gave away the craven coward of an impersonator. And presently, even the one gmail address that I have is largely dormant. Back then, I did not write to publicly deny the anti-Nduom impersonated article largely because of temporal strictures, but I vividly remember calling up my good friend, Mr. Sydney Casely-Hayford, then resident in the Washington, DC-Maryland metropolis and confiding to him about the person that I strongly suspected to have so criminally impersonated me.
Well, the second giveaway of the author of the article titled "Nana Akufo Addo To Listen To Only Two Voices Out Of The Four" is that it glaringly lacks the characteristic "Seal" of the address of my academic and professional affiliation, that is, "Nassau Community College of SUNY," which appears on every article that I have written and published anywhere, except for my poetry and other works of art. The caption of the article is also too awkward and academically infra dig - in sum, it is rather too insolent for anybody to suggest that I would publicly dabble in such lurid acts of abject levity as the "hearing of voices." That is for the feeble-minded and the emotionally unbalanced. The author also uses such peculiar expressions as, "I have also just read on Ghanaweb under its General news of Friday 24 January 2014." No citizen or longtime resident of the United States that I know of dates his/her documents in the British imperial style. I also never write "General News" vis-a-vis my references to news items culled from or read on the Ghanaweb.com website.
Then also, I have never described even the most disagreeable of Ghanaian media operatives in such crude language as the following: "...that quack Ghanaian pollster going by the name of Ben Ephson." Neither have I ever described Mr. Mahama as the "insatiably greedy President Mahama." I would also not use such legal term as "NDC and assigns." The list of linguistic incongruities goes on and on and on.
My simple admonishment to the writer of the aforementioned article is that if he is too lily-livered to pen and sign his own abjectly uncouth articles in his own name and identity, then he should cease and desist forthwith. I have not been to London in five years, and so could obviously not have written about any sermon by any pastor in a London church. The reader also just needs to take a look at the very last paragraph of the impersonated article and draw his or her own logical conclusions. Then also, I will advise the editors and webmasters of the Modernghana.com website, and all the other major Internet websites, to track down the IPS Number of the culprit/impersonator and promptly expose him before he does more serious damage to both of us.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 25, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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