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Opinions of Saturday, 21 September 2013

Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame

Richard Anane Is Damaged Goods!

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

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) is not a political organization whose leadership has an enviable, and/or credible, track-record of objective non-factionalism, and so it is not clear just what he means when Dr. Richard Anane rather vacuously accuses the party's hard-nosed General-Secretary of tendentiously shilling for Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the 2008 and 2012 Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (See "Resign If You Want To Do Akufo-Addo's Bidding; Richard Anane Tells Sir John" Adomonline.com/Ghanaweb.com 9/17/13).

The fact of the matter is that he has absolutely no integrity, whatsoever; in other words, Dr. Anane would do himself great good by hopping aboard the Mahama Gravy Train with the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu II, by furthering the interests of the man whose fraudulent declaration as winner of Election 2012 was recently, and shockingly, endorsed by the integrity-deprived Supreme Court of Ghana, than rather unwisely attempting to assume leadership of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition. It will not wash!

Needless to say, this is a man who criminally ran down, and aground, the Ghana Airways Corporation by literally stealing hundreds of thousands of cedis of the public dole, which he unconscienably lavished on his "half-caste" American paramour, while his own indigenous Ghanaian wife was widely alleged to have been shunned and crassly disrespected. Talk of inferiority complex and pathological rusticity!

In fine, the man has no enviable moral stature; he is a rascal of indescribable proportions. That he was once blindly and shamelessly patronized by former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, is all the more reason why the NPP-MP for Kumasi-Nhyiaeso ought to be promptly discounted as a worthwhile candidate for the flagbearership of the New Patriotic Party.

Indeed, the wanton shenanigans of Dr. Anane and the shameless public backing of the latter may well have caused President Kufuor's condign loss of the Mo Ibrahim Prize. But what is even more significant to highlight here is that Dr. Anane epitomizes that incorrigibly decadent faction within the New Patriotic Party that radically offset and dissipated much of whatever the Kufuor administration had to show for its otherwise relatively far better stewardship of the country's economy than the Rawlings-chaperoned National Democratic Congress.

He must also be hallucinating when Dr. Anane claims that he is under pressure to lead the NPP into Election 2016. He had better tell the world just what kind of moral reprobates have been pressuring him into attempting to deck a leadership mantle which he clearly does not deserve. And he had better not blunder into presuming himself to be the classmate or peer of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, vis-a-vis the latter's yeomanly contribution to our national political culture.

This article is intended to serve as an unmistakable signal to Dr. Anane that if he misguidedly attempts to hobble the political fortunes of the NPP, we would be all over his trail from now until December 2016. We intend to make him miserable in a way that he had never experienced in his life before; we intend to put him in his place! He may deem himself to be the Darling Bad Boy of Nhyiaeso, but by no means ought he presume himself to have any remarkable traction on the national political scence. He is an indelible blight on Ghanaian politics. Dr. Anane is a bad joke!

The former minister for Aviation and Road Transport is also execrably wrong to think that, somehow, he deserves the bold and shameless backing of former President Kufuor but that Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie (aka "Sir John") has absolutely no right to back Nana Akufo-Addo for a third Atta-Mills shot at the presidency. Let him push his luck and see just what happens.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Sept. 17, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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