The NDC Made a Lot of Electioneering Capital out of this Fake News Report

I had quite a few readers of my columns, mostly hopelessly pathological cynics and hired goons of the main opposition National Democratic Congress, who incessantly annoyed me by asking why I had not written any critical pieces about the allegedly forced closure of the official bank accounts of the Ghana Embassy in the Belgian capital of Brussels, which is also the capital of the European Union (EU). Now, I find this to be rather amusing, being that I am also a trained historian with a modicum of passable knowledge and appreciation of King Leopold’s infamous and wanton atrocities in the former Belgian-Congo, which is today known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which many of these cynical anti-New Patriotic Party critics may not necessarily be aware of, being that even as I write, I have just learned to my utter chagrin and horror that the academic subject or discipline of History has been scrapped from the curriculum of the public school system in Ghana.

Now, they have something called Social Studies, which is not exactly the same as traditional History as we know it, at least those of our readers who grow up with my generation of the late 1960s and the 1970s. You see, while I was growing up, what they call Social Studies today was called Civics, a soft academic discipline or sub-discipline which was more like a crossbreed between Sociology and Political Science or Current Affairs and Cultural Studies. I routinely teach some aspect of the foregoing as “Cultural Literacy” in my regular English-language courses at my community college. The objective here is to make my globally diverse pool of students appreciate the academic significance of societal self-awareness, something that is woefully lacking in the curricular package of the sort of Social Studies presently taught in the Ghanaian public school system. Which is why these days, one sees a rush for the vacuous acquisition of European names, speciously passed off as “Christian Names,” oftentimes, by many a deeply alienated Ghanaian citizen. Oftentimes, such names are blindly copied from television shows.

At any rate, in the news article that I have right here before me, we are categorically informed by the Head of Delegation of the European Union (EU) to Ghana, Ambassador Diana Acconia, that there is absolutely no evidence of money laundering by any Akufo-Addo-appointed diplomatic operatives at the Ghana Embassy in Belgium (See “No Evidence of Money Laundering in Akufo-Addo Administration and Ghana – EU” Pulse.com.gh 10/12/20). Even more significantly, we are informed by Ambassador Acconia that the European Union institutional establishment itself also had its bank accounts with the same ING Bank ordered closed, without any official explanation by the bank regarding why such order was issued or being issued.

To further buttress her testimony in favor of the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party, Ambassador Acconia announced that the EU had, in fact, advanced a humongous economic assistance to the Akufo-Addo Administration worth the tune of € 87 Million, in the form of a grant or nonrepayable financial assistance to help the Government of Ghana alleviate the plight of underprivileged Ghanaian citizens hardest hit by the Coronavirus Pandemic. This is what the New Patriotic Party’s Communications Operatives ought to have been highlighting all along, in the runup to the 2020 General Election; but, unfortunately, as they have often done in the past, the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party allowed their power-hungry opponents of the National Democratic Congress to determine the narrative angle and course or thrust of the contents of the story of the ING bank’s closure of the Ghana Embassy in Brussels’ account with that globally renowned financial institution.

Of course, matters were not the least bit meliorated by the exposure of the Agyapa Minerals Investment Deal that was widely alleged to have been coauthored by Ghana’s Finance Minister, Mr. Kenneth K. Ofori-Atta and some of his associates, with barely two months before the 2020 Presidential Election. There are, of course, invariably two sides to every story; what the ruling New Patriotic Party’s Communications Team has yet to learn is how to make their versions of these fortunes-altering stories carry greater weight with the Ghanaian electorate and the citizenry than those of their main rivals and political opponents. The NPP’s Communication Team must not wait until the party has been pushed onto the margins of opposition before beefing up the strength and substance of its communication strategies and apparatus or machinery. The NPP’s Communications Team Members need to start behaving as if they have already been pushed into opposition and fiercely fight off the wanton mendacities of their most formidable opponents of the so-called National Democratic Congress. Ghanaians cannot afford the apocalyptic return of Dumsor and the economy-demolishing squad of the Mahama Posse.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

January 9, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]