Nii Armah Akomfrah Is Right On Sam George Nettey

It begins to make sense that Mr. Sam George Nettey would mock Nana Akufo-Addo by disrespectfully calling Ghana's main opposition leader "Grandpa." The fact of the matter is that the young man who seems to disdain his Dangme surname of "Nettey," may well have been raised by a teenage mother. Very likely, the identity of his father is unknown. Which is why he would so facilely and crudely presume to use the clinical immobility of the General-Secretary of the rump-Convention People's Party (r-CPP) against Mr. Ivor Kobina Greenstreet.

Following the latter's goodwill/solidarity address to the 2014 National Democratic Congress' primary elections in the Asante regional capital of Kumasi, in which the r-CPP scribe pointedly asserted that President Mahama's so-called Better-Ghana Agenda continued to elude visibility, Mr. Nettey, the so-called NDC Communicator and Presidential Staffer, was widely reported to have riposted on his Facebook Wall as follows: "Ivor Greenstreet apparently needs some elevation to see the Better Ghana" (See "Sam George Apologizes for His 'Elevation' Gaffe" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/20/14).

As already adumbrated above, Mr. Greenstreet is wheelchair-bound. Perhaps the best answer to Mr. Nettey's gross display of insensitivity and downright puerility came from the Advocacy Officer of the Ghana Federation of the Disabled, Mr. Isaac Tuggun, who pointedly noted that "If the Better-Ghana Agenda were generating the expected results, would we [the mobilely disabled or the paraplegic] need to stand up on our feet to see that?" Indeed, I could not help wondering what my old teacher and recently deceased distinguished and immortalized writer and thinker, Prof. Chinua Achebe, would have said in response to Mr. Nettey. Most likely, the wheelchair-bound Prof. Achebe would have admonished a savage Mr. Nettey to promptly seek psychiatric examination as well as psychological counseling.

That the NDC hack wrote his aforesaid abuse of Mr. Greenstreet on the wall of his Facebook, may well have falsely afforded him a sense of protective distance, even privacy, from his prime target of abuse. Consequently, the emotionally troubled Mr. Nettey (for only an emotionally disturbed person would stoop so low in his gratuitous use of abusive language) clearly appears to have been caught off-guard by the torrents of responses from "visitors" who found his tawdry attack not only to be insufferably distateful, but also downright idiotic.

The following is the sort of sheepish and rather bizarre apology that the impudent butterball decided to render Mr. Greenstreet: "But in anyway if my statement did affect his sensibility, I respectfully and from the deepest [depths?] of my heart apologize for any inconvenience that I [might] have caused him and the National Federation for the Disabled and the National Council of Persons Living With Disability, because it has nothing whatsoever, absolutely nothing to do with disability. It has everything to do with philosophy, it has everything to do with politics...." Well, predictably, President Mahama's pet go-fer and regular stand-in voice has since virulently retracted his apology. A Better-Ghana Agenda, indeed!

And precisely what kind of politics is Mr. Nettey talking about? And just what does he mean by his meanspirited and ad-hominem attack on Mr. Greenstreet being one that purely emanates out of sheer political rhetoric? At any rate, r-CPP Communications Director Nii Armah Akomfrah could not have put it any more poignantly when he admonished his NDC counterpart to think deeply before presuming to make an arrant fool of himself with such morally and culturally outrageous remarks.

Words both well-chosen and well-said. But have they also been well-heard? That is the question. Really!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 20, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]