By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
As a quarrelsome member of the so-called National Democratic Congress' Communication Team (NDC-CT), Mr. Felix Kwakye-Ofosu did not half-distinguish himself as one who could constructively engage his audience in meaningful discussions of national issues. And so I am not one bit surprised that the now-deputy information minister would so vainly hedge his life around the decision of the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court on the ongoing Akufo-Addo/New Patriotic Party (NPP) Election 2012 presidential petition (See "I Bet My Life That NPP Will Lose Court Case - Ofosu-Kwakye" Peacefmonline.com 6/8/13).
Is this some curious version of a hari-kari stunt, or it is simply that Mr. Kwakye-Ofosu (some call him Ofosu-Kwakye) is experiencing some sort of ennui - or existential boredom - such that he has decided to commit ritual suicide for national burial? Either way, we firmly believe that his mediocre life is not deserving of even half the attention that he appears to be so fervently craving.
Anyway, according to the Information Ministry's second-bananas, the petitioners appear to have back-pedalled away from their initial contention of glaring "connivance between President Mahama and [the] EC to rig the elections which form[sic] the basis of the NPP's decision to go to court" but which, somehow, Mr. Kwakye-Ofosu risibly claims to be "nowhere in their pleadings."
If, indeed, what Mr. Kwakye-Ofosu asserts in the foregoing quoted news report has validity, then why has President Mahama been insistent, including a statement that the latter publicly made barely two weeks ago, that at no time did he collusively attempt to rig Election 2012? Needless to say, after an initial apparently diplomatic reluctance to directly accuse Mr. Mahama, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia emphatically observed the clear electoral-rigging connivance between the President and the Electoral Commissioner; and so precisely what is Mr. Kwakye-Ofosu talking about here?
I also don't know that the member of a party whose key operatives and founding fathers have an unenviable track-record of extra-judicial abductions and assassinations, has any moral authority to accuse the leaders of the main opposition New Patriotic Party of lacking "basic principles of [good] conduct," as well as lacking a remarkable modicum of "respect [for the] basic tenets of decent behavior."
Exactly what kind and level of "decent behavior" is the Information Ministry's go-fer talking about when, not long ago, the National Chairman of his own party, the so-called National Democratic Congress, publicly threatened the lives of Chief Justice Georgina Wood and her associates on the august Supreme Court of Ghana?
It is also none the least bit surprising that Mr. Kwakye-Ofosu would presume to impugn the intelligence of Ghanaian citizens as follows: "Sometimes Ghanaians don't want to be told the truth. We tolerate mediocrity; we need to hold people who seek public office to a high standard of conduct."
Well, the foregoing assessment clearly appears to more accurately measure the abjectly shallow intellect of the man who appointed Mr. Felix Kwakye-Ofosu a deputy minister of state, than it does the rest of us Ghanaians, both resident at home and abroad.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York June 9, 2013 E-mail: [email protected] ###