Where Is Nana Akufo-Addo?

Newly appointed Foreign Minister Nana Akufo-Addo seems to be missing. Two weeks ago, he was announced as having travelled outside the country on official Government business and that former Minister of Foreign Affairs now Ministers of Interior Hackman Owusu-Agyeman would be acting in his stead.

He has since not been heard of, and in a very untypical Ministry of Foreign Affairs manner, the country has not been told where he has gone to and what he has gone to do. In his absence, the President travelled to Mauritius without him. Instead, the President travelled with his Ashanti kith and kin, newly appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and NPP MP for Ejisu-Juaben, Akwasi Osei Adjei.

Indeed it has been noticed by keen observers that President Kufour and Nana Akufo-Addo have never travelled together since the latter was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, a most unusual occurrence since a President and his Foreign Minister are almost like Siamese twins when it comes to foreign travels.

These developments have prompted NPP-watchers to suspect that the two are proving to be very uncomfortable bedfellows and that it will not be long before Nana Akufo-Addo is shunted off to another Ministry, possibly Private Sector Development (he has a Third class degree in Economics).

At the time of the recent ministerial reshuffle, observers feared that the present ‘cat and mouse’ game would be played. They predicted that Nana Akuffo-Addo’s flamboyance and eloquence would totally outshine and eclipse the dour and unimpressive delivery of President Kufour on their foreign travels, and that not even Nana’s diminutive height would detract from the likelihood of his grabbing more attention and ‘stealing’ the highlight from the otherwise tall and gangling President Kufour.

It will be recalled that at the 1998 Sunyani Congress of the NPP that elected President Kufour as the Party’s flagbearer, Nana Akufo-Addo was his closest and bitterest rival. The Party has since been divided into pro-Kufour and pro-Akufo-Addo camps which appeared to have been papered over following the unanimous endorsement of President Kufour as the Party’s Sekondi Congress held early this year.

However, the recall of the ‘anointed one Alan Kyeremanteng, from his cosy and comfortable Ambassadorial position in Washington DC into the hurly-burly of mainstream domestic politics as Minister of Trade, Industry, and Special Presidential Initiatives (MOTISPI), obviously to put him in pole position for the 2008 flagbearership slot which Nana Akufo-Addo has been coveting all the time, is what appears to have reopened old wounds and resurrected the rivalry between Kufour and Akufo-Addo.

It is very likely that Nana Akufo-Addo’s days as Minister of Foreign Affairs are numbered and he could become one of Ghana’s shortest-serving Foreign Affairs Ministers.