Ghana: Message to President Barack H. Obama

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

There is a very embarrassing and downright shameful development raging in Ghana even as I write (6/17/09), which seriously impugns that great, albeit geographically modest, country’s democratic culture and credentials as an enviable model for the emergent democracies on the African continent that I firmly believe you, President Barack Hussein Obama, ought to know about and possibly address during your July stopover visit to the country.

First of all, it would be worth your while to fully appreciate the grim fact that the government currently in power, whose leaders you will be conferring with, and who clinically operate a hardnosed and nominally ironic political juggernaut called the National Democratic Congress (NDC), has done unsavorily little to advance the noble cause of the democratic rule of law.

What this means is that whatever credit the country has won in the international community, during the past decade, or so, has been achieved largely by Ghana’s main parliamentary opposition party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), which until January 2009 was led by Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor. But, perhaps, what is even more significant and the main reason for dispatching this message – Ghanaians resident at home prefer to call it a “write-up” – is that even as I compose this message, the immediate-former Speaker of Ghana’s National Assembly, or Parliament, the equivalent of the United States congressional Speaker of the House, is being callously persecuted for a pure act of human error that he is alleged to have committed during the last day of his, otherwise, yeoman’s service to his country.

To cut to the chase, as it were, Speaker Ebenezer Begyina Sekyi-Hughes, 69 years old, stands accused of having removed some household furnishings from his official residence which he ought not to have done, for obvious reasons. I am quite sure that you, Mr. Obama, may readily recall, during the last decade-and-half, that a diligent “first couple” who once occupied the White House (I prefer to call the latter “Benjamin Banneker House,” now that you are its distinguished and pioneering occupant) was brought up on a similar charge. I don’t quite recall how this ethical anomaly was resolved, but I also don’t remember any American lawmakers or politicians calling for the noggins of the afore-referenced first couple on a diamond platter. In Ghana, though, this is exactly what is going on, and by a group of people who may aptly be deemed to be the least qualified for such public finger-pointing.

Anyway, not only has the victim, unarguably a distinguished Ghanaian public servant, publicly apologized for his misconduct and even returned most of the items that he is alleged to have illegally removed from his former (official) residence, Mr. Sekyi-Hughes – who initially offered to pay for the retail-value of the items allegedly removed – continues to be harassed and pilloried. To-date, the former Speaker has been forced to appear several times before the Ghanaian parliament to explain this one error of judgment and been subjected to unnecessary ridicule and familial humiliation, merely because Mr. Sekyi-Hughes also happens to be a bona fide member of the now-opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), the very party which, 8 years ago, began the quite daunting task of enviably repositioning Ghana where it is now, among the respectable ranks of young and fledgling democracies, as well as working admirably to achieve a drastic reduction in our country’s level of poverty, as clearly and neatly specified in the Millennial Development Goals (MDGs) exhorted by the United Nations Organization (UN).

Mr. President, what makes the preceding state of affairs even more disturbing is the fact that the self-righteous government of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), presently led by President John Evans Atta-Mills, spent approximately 20 years as a quasi-military dictatorship suppressing ideological dissent, executing Ghanaian citizens that the then-Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), spearheaded by Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings (1982-2000), cavalierly branded as enemies of its pseudo-Marxist and anti-American revolution. Several more Ghanaians who went missing under the extortionate tenure of the PNDC (1982-1992), now expediently morphed into the so-called National Democratic Congress, have yet to be accounted for.

Indeed, so nationally embarrassing has the systematic persecution of Mr. Sekyi-Hughes become that even the former chairman of the Rawlings-minted Public Tribunal – the rough equivalent of a revolutionary death squad, on the milder side – on Tuesday, June 16, 2009, issued a press statement calling on President Atta-Mills “to exercise your prerogative powers to prevent the [near-certain] trial [and likely imprisonment] of Mr. Ebenezer Begyina Sekyi-Hughes [an elected former member of the Ghana National Council of State – the purely advisory equivalent of the British House of Lords] for any wrongdoing” (See “Former Tribunal Chairman Appeals for Clemency for Sekyi-Hughes” Ghana News Agency June 16, 2009).

For me, personally, the very fact of Mr. Sekyi-Hughes being 69 years old recalls another painful episode and era in postcolonial Ghanaian history. And regarding the latter, I am, of course, referring to the prison assassination of Dr. Joseph Boakye-Danquah, commonly and indisputably envisaged as the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics and the man credited with co-founding the first trans-ethnic modern Ghanaian political party, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), without the benefit of judicial scrutiny at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, just outside Ghana’s capital city of Accra, by President Kwame Nkrumah.

And here must be recalled the fact that at the time of his death, February 4, 1965, Dr. Danquah (a.k.a. “JB”), the first continental African to have been awarded the Doctor of Philosophy degree by any major Western academy in the 20th century (1927), and a great friend of the United States, having also distinguished himself as Ghana’s foremost constitutional lawyer, was 69 years old. Where personal sentiments come into sharp relief, or focus, regards the fact that Dr. J. B. Danquah was also my paternal granduncle.

Indeed, in his appeal to President Atta-Mills for clemency on behalf of Speaker Sekyi-Hughes, PNDC Tribunal Chairman Addo-Aikins highlighted the fact of the advanced age of Mr. Sekyi-Hughes as a factor worthy of serious consideration, but particularly also the fact that the former Speaker had rendered highly “commendable service” to Ghana.

Mr. President, isn’t it rather wickedly ironic for a government the overwhelming majority of whose leadership filthily enriched itself under the specious guise of “ex-gratia” awards for patently undistinguished public service to be flagrantly threatening their civically superior fellow citizen with the dagger of imprisonment for merely having removed household furnishings, most of which have since been returned, from his former official residence? Indeed, as even Tribunal Chairman Addo-Aikins “diplomatically” intimated, “taking Mr. Sekyi-Hughes to court would only amount to flogging a dead horse.” For me, the latter constitutes nothing short of the immitigable height of a moral and judicial travesty.

GOD BLESS US ALL!

Warm regards,

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 20 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###