Appiah-Menkah Meets Akosua

Appiah-Menkah (r) touring the Daily Guide

Nana Akenten Appiah-Menkah, one of Ghana's foremost industrialists and a lawyer by profession, has explained that he instituted an award for the best cartoonist because he seeks to have the medium expose for condemnation of evils of ethnic and political polarization in the Ghanaian society.

He was speaking during a visit to the offices of the DAILY GUIDE where he met the first winner of the award whose nom de guerre is Akosua and showered complements on her.

Akosua's identity continues to be a guarded secret but the industrialist had the rare opportunity of meeting her during the visit.

He said he got interested in cartoons through a cartoonist on UK's Daily Telegraph, Andy Carp, adding “I can read any cartoon.”

When Rawlings campaigned against his Apino soap, he recalled that it was a cartoonist, Yaw Buadu-Ayeboafo of the Graphic and the late PAV Ansah who stood to counter the campaign.

While the cartoonist, whose name he could not remember, cartooned workers under him lamenting their plight, Yaw Buadu-Ayeboafo and PAV used their columns to rubbish the anti-Apino campaign.

Speaking directly to the cartoonist, he said “you should use your cartoons to expose for condemnation and eradication the evils of tribal and political polarization of the country and its institutions in conscionable abuse of political executive power and corruption.”

All the aforementioned evils, he noted, are gradually creeping into the Ghanaian society since the inception of the Fourth Republic.

Akosua, he stated, “must flag out for appreciation and recognition all national achievers and communicate promoters of multi-party creed and establishment of the rule of law in the country.”

Appiah-Menka, 76, said he has not dropped his plans of sponsoring the best cartoonist to the continental level.

He said he takes pride in people who develop themselves and excel in their chosen endeavours as Akosua has done.

Appiah-Menkah took DAILY GUIDE through his rich history from how he stowed away to the United Kingdom and his intermittent political prison life in the country.

The man whose soap, Apino Soap became a subject of adverse political campaigning by ex-President Rawlings, stowed away to the UK where he worked for sometime in an infirmary's mortuary before he chanced upon the late Krobo Edusei, who wondered why a second-year law student would be working in a mortuary.

The Convention People's Party (CPP) man organized a Cocoa Marketing Board scholarship for him, he said, which saw him leaving the mortuary assignment.

On why he left the CPP, even after playing important roles in the party earlier, he said he could not stand what for him were human rights abuses during the tenure of the country's first president.

“How could JB Danquah die in prison after only a year when Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in a white man's prison,” he said.

The Akosua Tuntum case, in which a queenmother was arrested during the Nkrumah regime, he said, was the last straw to break the camel's back and he quit the party.

He was the queenmother's counsel in the case, he recalled, adding the case came up because the queenmother defied an order to have a certain chief who died in prison buried within five hours.

She had the remains of the deceased laid out but was quickly arrested by the police, he noted.

Appiah-Menkah has authored a book which is both a biography and a compendium of local politics- The River In The Sea.

On the future of the awards, he said “I would get involved. I left this year's in the hands of the committee but told the members that if I had my way it should be Akosua”.

By A.R. Gomda