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

I am not a member of the Akufo-Addo Legal Team, which makes perfect sense, since I have never trained as a lawyer. What I know for a fact, however, is that the editor-publisher of the so-called Africa Watch magazine, who claims to be privy to the arrest of the Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) on drug charges some six years ago, is not the kind of journalist that any well-meaning and self-respecting Ghanaian citizen can trust (See “Asante Bediatuo Has Failed to Clear Akufo-Addo” Peacefmonline.com 8/18/11).
Well, I first got to know Mr. Steve Mallory (alias Kwadwo Osei), a bona fide cohort of the group that I have dubbed “The Ejisu/Edweso Boys” in 1988, when the young man came to the Harlem offices of the New York Amsterdam News, the world-renowned African-American newspaper of record, as it were, in the New York Metropolitan Area, desperately looking for a job as a sports writer. He would be briefly interviewed by the then Ghanaian managing-editor of the weekly and sent off on his way, because the Ghana Institute of Journalism-trained alumnus knew practically nothing about the foremost American pastime of baseball.
I know what I am talking about because I was in the editorial suite of the Amsterdam News working as a freelance reporter; I was also then a student at the City College of New York of the City University of New York. I even saw off the visibly crestfallen Mr. Mallory at the 125th Street Subway (or Underground Train) Station back to the Borough of Brooklyn from whence he had come. We would also keep in touch fairly regularly by phone. Steve would shortly end up working for the Daily Challenge, a relatively minor African-American newspaper published out of Brooklyn by Mr. Thomas Watkins, Jr.
Indeed, it was after his stint with the latter rag that Mr. Mallory started publishing his first newspaper, the African Observer, assisted by a Sierra Leonean journalist who would shortly part ways with his Ghanaian colleague. We shall come back to this section of my encounter with “Opanyin” Kwadwo Osei a little later.
One thing that I darn well know for a fact is that Mr. Mallory is a political prostitute, a knave and a gigolo, to be precise; for the now editor-publisher of the so-called Africa Watch magazine used to work for the notorious Capt. Kojo Tsikata until he apparently had a spiritual and/or moral turnaround and decided to hop onto the Kufuor wagon and started trucking with the main opposition New Patriotic Party throughout much of the 1990s. All this while, Mr. Mallory regularly used his little-read newspaper to publish reams of what he imperiously claimed to be the villainous shenanigans of Capt. Tsikata and the Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress (NDC). We also know that prior to his arrival here in the United States, Mr. Kwadwo Osei had worked with the Voice of America (VOA) and even done 15-minute weekly broadcasts from Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, that sought to expose the behind-the-scenes activities of the NDC to the proverbial international community. For the foregoing reason, some of his most ardent critics have even suggested that Mr. Mallory was once in the pay of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Indeed, because of his putatively unpatriotic activities, at one time the editor-publisher of Africa Watch was on the “Most Wanted” list of the National Democratic Congress. And so it is quite interesting that Mr. Mallory would now be marching in lock-step with the anti-Akufo-Addo Ewe-Wing of the very party that once envisaged him to be one of his inveterate enemies. But then, hasn’t it been long recognized that, indeed, “Politics makes strange bedfellows”?
Anyway, throughout much of the 1990s, Capt. Tsikata and his cohorts were widely reported to be engaged in a legal tussle and wrangle with Mr. Mallory. The latter himself gleefully regaled me with the same. Capt. Tsikata, who was then Mr. Rawlings’ National Security Adviser, was, reportedly, in regular consultation with his lawyers right here in the United States over the possibility of bringing a libel suit against the man who until recently was in the pay of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who may well have facilitated Mr. Mallory’s departure from Ghana and entry into the United States.
Mr. Mallory, it is significant to observe, used the bulk of the news pages of his now-defunct African Observer newspaper to detail his supposedly epic battles with Capt. Tsikata in order to make himself feel like the Promethean hero that he could never become in ten lifetimes!
Let us conclude this section of our discussion on the “Spiv” called “Steve” by highlighting the fact that when upon the approval of his application for permanent residence here in the United States, as has been the practice for decades, Mr. Mallory had to go back to his native country to receive his green card, “Opanyin” Kwadwo Osei chose, instead, to go to Liberia.
Is this, therefore, the so-called man of impeccable credibility that Mr. Michael “Trokosi” Dokosi and the rest of the Ewe-Wing of the so-called National Democratic Congress want Ghanaians to believe to be worthy of our sedulous attention? And also that, indeed, an emotionally erratic sponge like Mr. Steve Mallory has any authoritative edge on the character and integrity of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo? Come on, folks, get a grip!

*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of 22 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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