Maame Tiwaa Addo-Danquah Must Be Removed Pronto! - Okoampa-Ahoofe

My first problem with the appointment of Commissioner of Police (COP) Maame Tiwaa Addo-Danquah, as Director-General of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service (GPS), began with the leaked audiotape of the A-Plus Affair, in which the Hip-Life artist and sometime New Patriotic Party’s electioneering-campaign jingles composer or singer was widely reported to have accused some Deputy Presidential Staffers of rank corruption in the awarding of government contracts.

On the aforementioned audiotape, COP Tiwaa Addo-Danquah was heard rather unprofessionally, albeit in a well-meaning manner, attempting to politically tendentiously play the placatory role of a mediator, instead of dispassionately launching a full-scale investigation into the complainant’s allegation. That complainant, of course, was A-Plus, also known as Mr. Kwame Asare-Obeng.

In her latest faux-pas, COP Addo-Danquah is accused of playing fast-and-loose with the professional ethics and the institutional credibility of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) which, according to law-enforcement experts, is at an all-time low. The issue in contention, in this instance, regards the kidnapping of some three adolescent schoolgirls in the twin-cities of Sekondi-Takoradi, in the Western Region, since last year. The nation’s Chief Detective is accused of having falsely claimed that the location of the alleged kidnappers – alleged to be of Nigerian origin or nationality – had been conclusively and decisively marked down and encircled or cordoned off by police personnel, and that the victims were shortly to be reunited with their parents, family members and relatives.

Pressed further and urgently to cause the immediate release of the suspected victims of kidnapping, the CID’s Chief, reportedly, retracted unapologetically by rather cavalierly saying that she had deliberately and publicly lied to the general Ghanaian public and the parents and relatives of the missing girls in order to give some hope, false hope, that is, to the latter but that, in reality, the whereabouts of the missing girls were still unknown.

If the preceding account has validity, and this clearly appears to be the case, then either COP Addo-Danquah may be suffering from an acute case of dementia or, to be even more charitable, the first Ghanaian woman to hold the at once enviable and highly sensitive post of Director-General of the CID may be suffering from a mild case of mental retardation. In other words, the Chief Sleuth of the Ghana Police Service may very well be in dire need of psychiatric examination and treatment. Indeed, it cannot be gainsaid that as a duly sworn national security operative, Maame Tiwaa Addo-Danquah committed a criminal offense of the highest order when she looked Ghanaians straight in the eye and perpetrated this most scandalous and egregious act of official mendacity, for which she also got handsomely paid as a senior public service.

But, of course, hers is more symptomatic of the rank incompetence and general professional rot that have taken grips of the institution of the Ghana Police Service, at least since the inception of the faux Rawlings Revolution of the early 1980s. it is also quite obvious that while she may, indeed, possess the requisite sheepskin credentials for the job, nevertheless, COP Addo-Danquah is definitely not cut out for this most professionally and intellectually demanding job. She has actually made Ghanaian national security a laughingstock among the comity of the international law-enforcement community.

COP Addo-Danquah has also clearly become a major liability to the Akufo-Addo Presidency in the critical area of our national security and an unsavory and an unnecessary test of the administrative competence of the Akufo-Addo government. I am, by the way, quite certain that COP Addo-Danquah may be professionally and even intellectually reasonably well equipped with a remarkable breadth of knowledge about the general system of policing in the country.

But it is also unarguably clear that COP Addo-Danquah’s forte and métier or strong suit, as it were, lies well outside the purview of the sort of professionally and psychologically taxing skills and experience expected of the country’s Chief Detective. On the latter count, progressive feminism or the sort of gender inclusivity that brought COP Addo-Danquah meteorically into such prominence must be effectively be trumped by proven competence and professional dexterity and forthrightness of the highest order.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 18, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]