Did Kwesi Pratt edit the Independence anniversary brochure?

He is more disingenuous than the critics of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), but the Editor-Publisher of the Insight newspaper would have Ghanaians believe that it is rather the critics of President John Dramani Mahama, most notably the key operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) who are the disingenuous ones. For many years, Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jr., claimed to be a front-bench member of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP), until just the other day he was virulently and shamefully exposed for the veritable charlatan that many of us avid students and observers of postcolonial Ghanaian politics have always known him to be.

Now it turns out that so much bluster and all, Mr. Pratt has not paid up any membership dues to the Financial Secretary of the party for some umpteen years and change. Today, like Mr. Ben Ephson, his longtime buddy and clansman, Mr. Pratt is widely believed to be a paid media hack of the National Democratic Congress out of the hands of whose kleptocratic paymasters he has been gorging himself fat and furious and voracious like a pig. Which was why in the wake of President Mahama’s State-of-the-Nation’s Address (SONA), the infamous human decoy of the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), was morbidly concerned about the opponents of the President trotting out facts and figures, as well as high-definition photographs contradicting the largely propagandistic presentation to Parliament in which the former Rawlings Communications Minister took undue and shameless credit for projects that had either been initiated or completed by the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party.
Like Mr. Baba Jamal, the Mahama cabinet shill, Mr. Pratt would have Ghanaians shut up and pretend that the pathologically corrupt and effectively incapacitated Mahama/Amissah-Arthur regime is the best thing that ever happened to the country since President Nkrumah’s independence declaration at the old Accra Polo Grounds in the midnight of March 5, 1957. In other words, Mr. Pratt would have Ghanaians docilely applaud, and deafeningly so, if Mr. Mahama were to announce to the nation tomorrow morning that Mr. Uhuru Kenyatta is the newly elected President of the Democratic Republic of Ghana. In the passionately partisan social commentator’s scheme of things, if the President promises to build some 200 elementary schools in fours but at the end of his first term in office he has only five completed but unfurnished school buildings to square up with his promise, that is still a phenomenal achievement of nonesuch proportions.

Being frontally challenged and exposed for the fleering liar that he indubitably is, in the kickback-driven opinion of Mr. Pratt, runs counter to the cherished principles of our democratic culture. Mr. Pratt also sees absolutely nothing wrong with the marathon and largely vacuous SONA presentation of a President who clearly appears to have skipped high school attendance anytime the lesson for the day included the critical subject of Précis, or how to thoughtfully distill unwieldy chunks of passages into a terse and wholesome gem of rhetorical clarity. Now, dear reader, don’t write to me whining about how you find my style of writing too arcane and either extremely difficult or boring to read. The answer is quite simple – and it is the incontrovertible fact that there is a vast difference between the cranial capacity of a graduate of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute and that of the Danquah-founded flagship academy, the University of Ghana, Legon.

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