Akufo-Addo’s Rented Jet Was Value for Money

The decision by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to attend the UEFA Championship match of 2019, between world-famous Liverpool Football Club and Tottenham Hotspur, was absolutely no secret, as the Ghanaian opposition press would have the rest of the nation and the world believe (See “Akufo-Addo Rented Private Jet to Watch UEFA Champions League Final in Spain” TheHeraldGhana.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/25/19). To be certain, the decision had been widely publicized at least one week before the actual event came off, as I vividly recall. But to be equally certain, I vacillated very well over a couple of days before, finally, deciding to fire off this rejoinder, being that about 7 years ago, the then Executive-Director of the Danquah Institute (DI), the foremost New Patriotic Party’s think-tank, pontifically assured yours truly that he had absolutely no right to take on the thuggish Dokosi Gang, camped out at the “Daily Post,” because Mr. Michael Dokosi and his Trokosi nationalist hirelings of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) had long established themselves as credible critics of then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

The DI’s Executive-Director would promptly proceed to “punitively” delete the name of yours truly from among the list of the DI’s Board-of-Directors. He would, all-too-predictably and ironically, leave out the name of the irreparably vanquished Idiot-of-Irmo, South Carolina, who had then for several years been doggedly pursuing an Al-Qaeda-like agenda of unconscionably and inexorably character-assassinating then-Candidate Akufo-Addo as a potential tyrant and an incorrigibly violent personality who needed to be prevented from acceding to the Presidency at all costs. Well, this is a moral and a political blight on his biographical sheet that the former DI Director will have to eternally live with.

Anyway, report that President Akufo-Addo had chartered a private jet, namely, Airbus A 318-11, on the patently flimsy grounds that the latter was an 18-seater airbus, as opposed to Ghana’s Presidential Jet, which has only 14 seats, is flat-out preposterous; there ought to be a better explanation having more to do with both the safety of the alleged renter and marginal travel capacity. In other words, it is highly unlikely that the numerically negligible seating capacity of 4 between the Mills-Mahama-purchased Brazil-made Ghana’s Presidential Jet and that of Airbus A 318-11, alleged by both TheHeraldGhana.com and the Dokosi Gang-published Daily Post newspapers, would have determined the fact of whether Nana Akufo-Addo decided to travel on Airbus – A 318-11 or the 14-seater Ghana Presidential Jet. Very likely, the seating capacity of Airbus A 318-11 was much higher than these opposition tabloids would have their local Ghanaian audience believe.

Very likely, as another writer has already pointed out, the seating capacity of Airbus A 318-11 was at least nearly 10 times the seating capacity of Ghana’s Presidential Jet. We know the preceding for a fact because even a cursory rundown the list of the presidential entourage that allegedly accompanied the President to Madrid, Spain, for the UEFA soccer league championship was much higher than the figure of 18 given by the Dokosi Gang and its political allies and associates. We must also highlight the fact that former President John Dramani Mahama was widely known to routinely fly our country’s Presidential Jet with his wife, Lordina Mahama, alone and their pilot. Once, during the heated runup to the 2016 Presidential Election, Mr. Mahama, while visiting an orphanage or some such an establishment or institution, was widely reported to have nearly fatally crashed the Gulf Stream Jet or some such model Presidential Jet in the vicinity of the Asante regional capital of Kumasi.

So, really, if anything at all, President Akufo-Addo actually ought to be unreservedly commended for clearly putting Ghana’s Presidential Jet to a more efficient and profitable use. But, of course, what we need to even more significantly point out is the fact that the use of the allegedly rented Airbus A 318-11 was for far more than Nana Akufo-Addo’s recreational flight for the UEFA championship match between Tottenham Hotspur, the President’s favorite team, and the eventual winners of this year’s UEFA Cup, namely, Liverpool FC. The same jet would take Nana Akufo-Addo on more than 10 official trips to diverse places ranging in location from Canada, where he attended the much-talked-about “Women Deliver” global conference on women’s empowerment, to the Nigerian capital of Abuja; Georgetown, Barbados; Kingston, Jamaica and several other Afro-Caribbean nations, in the morally righteous campaign celebration of the 500^th Anniversary of what has been dubbed the Year-of-Return, an obvious reference to the apocalyptic Middle-Passage or the psychologically indelible trauma occasioned by the massive enslavement of Africans by Europeans between 1450 and 1850 CE/AD.

Predictably and characteristically, rather than highlight the many job-creating agreements initialed by President Akufo-Addo with the European and Afro-Caribbean nations, Nana Akufo-Addo’s NDC-sponsored media goons rather disingenuously chose to create the proverbial storm in a teacup by disproportionately playing up the President’s all-too-healthy decision to take a brief soccer-break from his unprecedently hectic schedule. At any rate, President Akufo-Addo, rather wisely and progressively, decided not to take his annual officially and constitutionally sanctioned vacation and, instead, chose to marginally mix the grueling demands of an official business schedule with a morally disciplined dosage of pleasure. Obviously, the Dokosi Gang and its associates were too impetuously livid with envy and anger to duly recognize and commend the same.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
June 27, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]