Akufo-Addo’s Presidency Is the Legitimate Choice of Ghanaians

If, indeed, he was a “close confidant” of the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, then, it goes absolutely without saying that Dr. Akofa Segbefia has absolutely no respectable iota of credibility to be telling Ghanaians that they might have made an egregious mistake by deciding to vote Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to the Presidency not once, but twice, and in both cases with unprecedented and record-setting electoral margins in Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Dispensation (See “Why Major Courage Quashigah Never Wanted Akufo-Addo to Be President – Dr. Segbefia” Ghanaweb.com 11/19/22).

Yes, Dr. Segbefia has absolutely no credibility, whatsoever, because he abjectly lacks the requisite democratic and/or democracy credentials to cavalierly presume to lecture Ghanaians about which of our major politicians most or best deserves to be afforded the sacred and the popular legitimate mandate of the Ghanaian people. If, indeed, Dr. Segbefia, as has already been herein observed, was a “close confidant” of the late former President Rawlings, then this insufferably haughty Akufo-Addo critic could be more aptly described as a coup-plotting conspirator and a heinously criminal traitor to the sovereignty and the democratic ideals of Ghana who needs to already have deeply buried his head and his eczema-tattooed body in shame and irredeemable remorse, rather than arrogantly presuming to be physiologically composed of better civic stuff or higher political morality than unarguably the most progressive, visionary and democratic Fourth Republican Ghanaian Leader.

By the way, to the anonymous or unsigned Ghanaweb.com reporter or editor who wrote the afore-referenced news story being herein discussed, the word “confidante” is the female version of the more subject-appropriate version of “confidant.” Now, don’t you write back, like a mentally retarded or a clinically demented buffoon, to tell yours truly that, after all, he fully appreciated what was meant by this inexcusably careless appropriation of diction. The fact of the matter is that were the author of the aforesaid diction-inappropriate news story either speaking or writing in one of the major Ghanaian languages, in particular the Akan-Twi dialect, s/he would not be playing fast-and-loose with his diction or choice of words without getting called to the carpet or promptly upbraided for the same.

At any rate, we also need to highlight the fact that nearly each and every one of the alleged “witnesses” and bona fide and staunch or front-row members of the presently ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) whom Dr. Segbefia mentions as having been worried silly or disturbed about the possibility of an Akufo-Addo Presidency does not qualify to make such a patently imperious judgment call because, to a person, these anti-Akufo-Addo Presidency-Doom-Predictors decidedly lacks the requisite democracy or democratic credentials to make such a momentous judgment call. Definitely not the late Major Courage Quashigah, whom this writer personally knew to indiscriminately pick up woefully underage secondary schoolgirls in the Akyem-Akwatia and Achiase vicinity but who, with the graciousness and mercifulness of time, came to mature remarkably and to redeem his leadership credentials well before he transitioned into eternity about a dozen years ago, if memory serves yours truly accurately.

Indeed, not only had Major (Ret) Quashigah served as Health Minister in the government of President John Agyekum-Kufuor, the Rawlings cousin was also Ghana’s Minister of Agriculture at the time of his death. But, of course, for a significant part of his professional military career, the Anlo-Keta native was widely known to be the staunch lieutenant or aide-de-camp of the late Chairman Rawlings, Ghana’s most globally infamous career coup-plotter and a veritable and an unconscionable nation-wrecker. You see, any Ghanaian citizen roughly about the same age as yours truly – and I am 61 years old, verging closely towards 62 years old – was old enough in 1983, when a then 34-year-old Chairman Rawlings literally took Ghana down the tubes or to the dogs, as New Yorkers are wont to say. So abominably catastrophic were the state of our national affairs that many of us even thought the world was coming to an end. This was the time of the coinage of what nationally came to be known as “Rawlings’ Necklace,” when more than half of the country’s population of some 8 to 10 million at the time became unprecedentedly malnourished and the collar bones began to show on nearly each and every Ghanaian blue-collar worker and middle- and lower-class civil servant.

In short, no matter how the country’s economy sags or sinks under the watch of President Akufo-Addo, the incontrovertible fact still remains that it cannot be compared to the Apocalyptic Ghana of 1983 under the bloody junta watch and leadership of Chairman Rawlings. We must also not be too scandalously forgetful to remember that in 1983, only approximately 30-percent of the Ghanaian people had ready access to electricity. The Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), whose executive operatives had violently ousted the democratically elected Dr. Hilla “Babini” Limann-led People’s National Party (PNP), on the grounds of the Sorbonne- and University of London-educated President’s having gone to the twin Bretton-Woods establishments of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (IBRD) for financial assistance, on December 31, 1981, would by June 1983 be convulsively knocking on the doors of both the IMF and The World Bank, you guessed right, Dear Reader, for an immediate economic bailout.

You see, nobody can take a perennial blabbermouth and John and Ibrahim Mahama-worshipping Akufo-Addo archnemesis like Dr. Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe seriously. One only needs to compare the national development track-records of Messrs. Mahama and Akufo-Addo in order to arrive at the politically unimpeachable decision of Ghanaian voters to catapult Nana Akufo-Addo onto the highest seat of the land, not once, but twice and at record-setting electoral margins. As for Mr. Kofi Koomson’s praying against the inevitable Presidency of the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, merely because the publisher of The Ghanaian Chronicle was deathly afraid of being clinically afflicted with insomnia, it is not even worth discussing in a two-word sentence. What matters most here and deserving of our indelible recognition and attention is the fact that dyed-in-the-wool Trokosi Nationalists like Dr. Akofa Segbefia are practically and ideologically incapable of seeing beyond their own reflection in the Galamsey-muddied waters of Keta and Sogakope. And that is a darn shame and a pity!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
November 20, 2022
E-mail: [email protected]