The Little Man from Kyebi Tells It Like It Is

Somebody who claimed to be an employee at the Auditor-General’s Department wrote to me a couple of times late last year to correct me on what the writer termed as my constantly annoying misspelling of the middle “birthday-name” of the recently retired Mr. Daniel “Yaw” Domelevo. “The middle name of the Auditor-General is ‘Yaw,’ not ‘Yao.’” I wrote back to thank the writer. The male writer would also write me a second letter stating that, in fact, Mr. John Dramani Mahama had not deviously and tactically attempted to sandbag the incoming Akufo-Addo Administration, but that Mr. Domelevo had coincidentally been up for promotion to the post of substantive Auditor-General, from the position of Acting Auditor-General after the well-anticipated exit of the extant Auditor-General, by the name of Mr. Oquaye or Akwei or some such name of Ga provenance or ethnicity. I would, once again, write back to thank the writer, whose name sounded like that of an Akan-descended person, to thank him for the correction.

Whatever the real case scenario might have been does not really seem to matter now, or at this juncture, as we have come to learn that, indeed, whether Mr. Daniel Yaw Domelevo had been strategically shoehorned into position by the outgoing Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress or not, the man had been poised to doing the bidding of his departing paymaster, in spite of his solemn promise to studiously cooperate and collaborate with the newly elected Akufo-Addo government to fiercely fight official corruption. And, oh, by the way, I raised the issue of the spelling of Mr. Domelevo’s birthday- or day-of-birth name of “Yaw” at the beginning of this column because nearly every news article that I have read with the retired Auditor-General as the subject, or newsmaker, has had Mr. Domelevo’s middle name spelt as “Yao,” in the typical or stereotypical Ewe fashion, rather than “Yaw,” which is the standard Akan version of the same.

So, the logical question that flashes up my mind or through my mind is this: Why does nobody seem to be interested in coming public to correct those writers and reporters who persist in “misspelling” Mr. Domelevo’s middle name as “Yao” instead of “Yaw”? Or maybe this is just what may be aptly termed as a byproduct of the sort of routine ethnic stereotyping that finds all Ewes invariably spelling their day-names in pretty much the same way and/or manner. In any event, what inspired this column was another news story captioned “Nothing Was Heard from You When Domelevo Indulged in Unacceptable Conduct – Akufo-Addo Slams CSOs” Ghanaweb.com 3/20/21). In the just-referenced news story, the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, chides the characteristically self-righteous, self-absorbed and obnoxiously pontifical leaders of the so-called Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in the country for not promptly calling Mr. Domelevo to order, not necessarily promptly or not promptly, when the latter brashly and brazenly attempted to tarnish the image and reputation of Mr. Yaw Osafo-Maafo, the recently retired Senior Presidential Minister, in the matter of Kroll Associates, the globally reputed investigative agency that was invited by the then-Senior Minister to scrutinize the general activities of the previous Mahama regime.

Mr. Domelevo would publicly and virulently accuse Mr. Osafo-Maafo of having deliberately undercharged services rendered the Akufo-Addo Government and, in effect, the nation at large, by Kroll Associates. Even after the Senior Minister had been duly cleared by a court of legitimate jurisdiction of any wrongdoing, Mr. Domelevo persisted with his impugnation of the character and reputation of Mr. Osafo-Maafo and, in effect, the Akufo-Addo Administration at large. I, personally, did not studiously follow all the details of the running fracas between the then-Auditor-General and the Senior Minister because, by nature and aptitude, I tend not to fully comprehend much of the intricate quiddities of the business world. Even the official business of the people. But, of course, I was still well aware of the fact of Mr. Domelevo’s apparently bad faith and wanton professional excesses being brought to a halt, in toto, by the law courts.

Anyway, in his quite poignant and opportune criticism, Nana Akufo-Addo decries the apparently unidimensional or one-sided approach to the examination, evaluation and the judgment of issues pertaining to governance by many of the leaders of these so-called Civil Society Organizations, largely entailing policy advocacy establishments and think-tanks. Part of the problem vis-à-vis the seemingly inordinate antigovernment biases of these CSOs may pretty much verge on the fact that until very recently, our governments tended to act as rules, regulations and laws unto themselves. Which meant that there was a complete absence of the sort of checks and balances that most constitutionally robust and functional democracies took for granted. Put into plain English, our governments in the relatively “dim past” had tended to be looked upon with suspicion and, at best, with great caution and even trepidation.

What Nana Akufo-Addo aptly hinted at recently was about the imperative need for leaders of Civil Society Organizations to synergistically help the government in the uphill anticorruption fight, instead of invariably envisaging the government of the day as a hostile and an intransigent bastion of official corruption. In other words, our governments, at least progressive ones like the present one, need to be envisaged as more protective of the interests, needs and aspirations of the people than the adversaries or enemies of the latter, for whose primary benefit governments exist.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

April 2, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]