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

When Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko asserts that he has been grossly misconstrued in his remarks regarding Nana Akufo-Addo’s flat refusal to be sold state-owned land at a give-away price, he is not quite to be understood as attempting to back-pedal, as some of his critics are apt to conclude. Rather, the overriding objective – and accurately so – of making such a poignant claim and then promptly so, is, of course, to necessarily differentiate the 2012 New Patriotic Party presidential candidate from other colleagues and peers who might have readily succumbed to such patently unethical inducement of public officials by those who ought to know better.
In the latter instance, it is not quite clear what “those who ought to know better” is in allusion to. And while, of course, connecting the Osu Castle under the Kufuor-led NPP may not be the most astute thing to do, nevertheless, the fact remains that somebody in government must have been in charge of such exploitive disposal of state lands. One ought not to, however, begrudge Mr. Otchere-Darko his inalienable right not to be either misquoted or grossly misrepresented by a conflict- and sensation-oriented Ghanaian press.
What is also interesting is the fact that recently, President John Evans Atta-Mills issued a statement from his office in which he vehemently denied that he had accepted any state-owned plot of landed property in the Tema section of the Greater-Accra Region. But that such vehement denial comes in the wake of vigorous attempts by the Mills-Mahama government to retrieve state lands that might have been unethically, albeit legitimately, doled out to public officials is quite telling in one unspoken respect. And it is the implicit fact that the opportunistic practice of generously helping themselves to lands held in public trust, on the part of government operatives, certainly did not begin with the Kufuor administration or the tenure of the “property-owning democrats” of the New Patriotic Party, as recent pontifical media propaganda might easily lead the non-initiate to believe.
We learn this much because in his statement officially denying any unethical and/or illegal appropriation of landed property belonging to the state, President Mills also neither denied nor confirmed the existence of the practice during the 19-plus years that the Rawlings-led Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) ruled the roost as Ghana’s de facto one-man, one-party tyranny. In other words, if, indeed, the practice of “bootifying” state-owned lands existed between at least 1982 and 2000, then, by all means, the Mills-Mahama government’s decision to retrieve state-owned lands that might have been either unethically and/or illegally disposed of ought to be temporally framed to cover the last three decades. Failure to follow through with the preceding suggestion would be tantamount to the devious orchestration of a self-serving moralist crusade that is primarily geared towards scoring cheap political points, perhaps at the 2012 polls, than any constructive attempt at restoring public confidence, respect and trust in public officials and other highly placed government operatives.
Consonant to the preceding, what ought to happen in the next several weeks, is for the government to publish the names of all beneficiaries of unethically-, as well as illegally-, disposed landed state properties retrospective from at least 1982. Of course, the temporal frame could go even further back to the very beginning of the postcolonial era. Such publication could also enable Ghanaians identify which of our leaders have had the interests of the ordinary citizen at heart, as well as the types of leaders who ought to be promptly banished from the mainstream political arena.

*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 21 books, including “Sounds of Sirens” (iUniverse.com, 2004). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
###