Has Partisan Politics Destroyed Kwesi Pratt?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 12, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The so-called Managing-Director of the Insight newspaper should stop pretending as if he has forged any exemplary or respectable media career, because his best days on the Ghanaian media landscape ended more than twenty years ago (See “Partisan Politics Will Destroy Bawumia – Pratt” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/12/15). Even in his heydays, Mr. Kwesi Pratt was not regarded as a very serious journalist. At best, he was a rabble-rouser. The nauseatingly garrulous man is also known to have spent his most productive years in media practice as a decoy (or a spy), first, for the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and, subsequently, for the Chairman Jerry John Rawlings-chaperoned Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) so-called.

We may never know the number of innocent and unsuspecting Ghanaian citizens whose lives and careers were either ruined or completely wasted by the dastardly political shenanigans of Mr. Pratt, even as attested by the authoritative likes of Warrant Officer Adjei-Boadi quite a while ago. In other words, the proprietor of the Insight newspaper is the last person to be deemed qualified to lecture Dr. Bawumia on how not to ruin either his already established and distinguished professional career or his fast-rising and equally distinguished political career. We must also add that in both spheres of endeavor, Dr. Bawumia has acquitted himself far more creditably than Mr. Pratt’s own paymaster, President John Dramani Mahama.

I was thus pretty amused when arguably the most incompetent Fourth-Republican Ghanaian leader recently had the chutzpah to tell his intellectual and professional superior to shut up because unlike the man who was pathetically gifted with the presidency by the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel, Dr. Bawumia had never been elected President of Ghana. I almost fell off my chair with laughter. It is also significant to observe that Mr. Pratt has always been a Leftist and unabashedly a junta-backing opportunist. Even as a Leftist, he has not been known to have creditably acquitted himself. Recently, for instance, the leadership of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) publicly and categorically denounced Mr. Pratt, as well as disowned the man, claiming he had never been a dues-paying member of the party.

We are also well aware of the fact that it was his shameless shilling for the PNDC that reportedly resulted in Mr. Pratt’s being criminally rewarded with press equipment belonging to Mr. Chris Asher, when the late legendary investigative journalist and editor-publisher of the Palaver newspaper was run out of the country by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and his Trokosi Nationalist Abongo Boys. Now Mr. Pratt can tell the world how it came about that the shameless recipient of stolen goods became a credible witness against the intellectually acute and morally forthright and upright sons of the land. But that Mr. Pratt would choose to air his lurid comments on Radio Gold, a passionately partisan National Democratic Congress-leaning media organization, is even more pathetic.

I also don’t know what precisely he means by calling Dr. Bawumia a “young man,” almost as if the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana were just starting out in life. You see, President Nkrumah, the iconic idol of Mr. Pratt’s, was younger than Dr. Bawumia, in 1951, when the Show Boy assumed reins of governance as Transitional Leader of Government Business. Nkrumah was also much less experienced in the adult art of national governance. I am also quite certain that Mr. Pratt has no adult children the same age as Dr. Bawumia. So precisely what does the talk-radio junkie mean trying to make Dr. Bawumia seem like a new kid on the block?

Then also, it is rather inexcusably sickening for Mr. Pratt to presume to patronize a giant economic maven like Dr. Bawumia by pretending to instruct the latter on what institutional sources and/or data to appropriate in critiquing the ineffably dull performance of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress vis-à-vis the management of Ghana’s economy. Existential longevity, or old age, Mr. Pratt needs to be frankly and emphatically told, is no substitute for intellectual and professional diligence and development. In both areas of human endeavor, Mr. Pratt is no classmate of Nana Akufo-Addo’s three-time running-mate.