As usual, at the just-concluded United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Session, Ghana’s President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo rather embarrassingly decided to address the wrong audience, namely, the leaders of the Western World and the European People at large (See “Africans Not Asking for Handouts, We Demand Equal Opportunities - Akufo-Addo Tells UN” Modernghana.com 9/25/24). It was a very embarrassing moment and a speech delivered to the wrong audience and the wrong forum. And I am quite certain that Dr. (Mrs.) Arikana Chihombori Quao, the lambent-witted Zimbabwean-born doctor married to a Ghanaian husband who is also a medical practitioner like herself, would have wasted absolutely no time in reminding Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo that the problem that the Leprechaun of Kyebi and Akyem-Abomosu was so bitterly complaining about was squarely the making of the unspeakably poor leadership that he and his counterparts spread across the African Continent have been providing their people at least for a half-century now.
You see, you cannot charter a private jet - even if such money came from your own personal bank account or wallet - and fly out of the country at the temporal expense of the lumpen-poor and the destitute in Ghana at some $10,000 (USD) per hour, to watch a match between Tottenham Spurs, your favorite English soccer team, and another European Premier League Soccer Team, in the British Isles, and count yourself to be equally deserving of access to the same business and industrial or socioeconomic opportunities as the other European nations and even some of the emergent Asian and Latin-American and Pacific-Rim Nations.
As I have already hinted, even if such money had come from the President’s own pocket, it would still not have been the most intelligent and profitable decision to make. Let’s face it, how many European or Western leaders are in the habit of such fiscally reckless and profligate misapplication of the collective resources of their countries who fly out to even their former “beloved” African colonies to watch local Premier League Soccer Tournaments, even by way of a diplomatic goodwill gesture?
But what Yours Truly really wanted to underscore here is this: “How many European leaders and politicians have the bulk of their wealth, authoritatively valued by Forbes’ Business Magazine to be in the range of millions and billions of dollars and pound sterling, invested or their money stashed in foreign bank accounts outside their countries and the so-called European Continent and the Americas, while they regularly jet out of their countries to the Washington, DC-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) and The World Bank, to beg for less than a quarter of their own monetary wealth as development aid for their filthy rich but wantonly and criminally exploited countries?
As usual, Yours Truly has also been wondering whether this most scandalous and morally embarrassing speech had not been prepared by the same clinical numbskull cousin of Ghana’s former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice by the name of Gabriel “Gabby” Asare Otchere-Darko. You see, the sort of opportunities that Nana Akufo-Addo spoke about in his latest and last or final speech or address to the Plenary Session of the United Nations’ General Assembly right here in New York City, that is, at the Headquarters of the most globally inclusive association of the International Community, does not routinely fall down to Earth like the proverbial manna spoken about during the historic and the Biblical Exodus of the Ancient Israelites out of Egypt into the present-day Palestine.
Rather, such game-changing opportunities are invariably created by “visionary” leaders like himself and several of his cabinet and executive appointees, including the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), to wit, the Oxbridge-educated Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia. Now, I apply the adjectival concept of “visionary” leader in the very narrow scope of the kind of morally laudable imagination that inspired the proverbial Leprechaun of Kyebi and Akyem-Abomosu to implement the hitherto historically unprecedented universally Fee-Free Access to Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education in the country.
I am also well aware of the fact that acute economic hiccups and all, the present lame-duck Akufo-Addo Administration has been able to maintain and significantly improve upon the quality of this keystone legacy of his administration, precisely because unlike the previous late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led ragtag government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), which callously and unconscionably caused the complete collapse and the total dismantling of the seminal Kwame Nkrumah-founded industrial revolution that was represented by the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), it was the “genius” ability of Ghana’s former Foreign Minister and Minister of ECOWAS Regional Integration to constructively dialogue with the corporate managers and the executives of the twin Bretton-Woods establishments of the World Bank - that is, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) - and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that has made it possible for this seismically game-changing intellectual, professional and vocational legacy of his to become possible.
Even amidst such fierce and devious attempts to scuttle the entire project of the universally Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System by the likes of Dr. Kwame Addo-Kufuor, the immediate younger brother of former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor and Ghana’s longest-serving Defense Minister; Prof. Ivan Addae-Mensah, Vice-Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Ghana, Legon; Prof. Stephen Adei, former Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA); and Prof. Ernest Aryeetey, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Legon, all of whom are notable and distinguished stalwarts of the ruling New Patriotic Party.
Surprisingly or, perhaps, not so surprisingly, none of these intellectual and academic and professional heavyweights, at least by Ghanaian standards, as a former white-American colleague who had a brief stunt in Ghana in the late 1970s, under the tutelage of the late Prof. Kofi Awoonor, used to say, also called for the scrapping of the former President Agyekum-Kufuor’s keystone project of the low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which is even more capital intensive than the more socioeconomically far-reaching Akufo-Addo-implemented Universally Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System.
I am also very certain that absolutely no Western-European Leaders instigated or prevailed upon the four aforementioned influential Ghanaian citizens to call for the summary scrapping or the cancellation of the Fee-Free SHS on the dubious grounds of economic non-sustainability and/or the unsavory degradation of the hitherto purportedly globally qualitative Ghanaian public education system. Even more significant must be highlighted the fact that African leaders like Nana Akufo-Addo seriously and critically lack the kind of patriotism and emotional attachment that European and Western, as well as some Asian, leaders like Presidents Biden, Macron, Xi and Prime Ministers Modi and Starmer, for only a couple of the most obvious examples, have for the countries and the peoples over who they derive their powers, significance and dignity.
How many of these leaders have prevented their Continental African counterparts from constructing and equipping state-of-the-art hospitals and healthcare centers in their own countries, so that they would not have to fly abroad for personal medical checkups and treatments at the expense of marginally paid civil and public servants and other taxpayers? In William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy “Julius Caesar,” we have one of the characters in this great play by the name of Cassius tell a co-conspirator to the assassination of the increasingly megalomaniacal and eponymous protagonist: “The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” In other words, we are, each and everyone of us, products of our own making. You see, our leaders, including Nana Akufo-Addo, of course, cannot stash millions, if not billions, of dollars and investments in offshore bank accounts and expect to be blessed or endowed with the same socioeconomic opportunities as their Western-Eruopean counterparts back home in Africa. This is downright insane and criminally childish, to tell you, the Dear Reader and My Beloved Uncle, the unvarnished truth.
*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
Oct. 7, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]