Fiifi Kwetey Is Criminally Ignorant and Downright Stupid!

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

Fiifi Kwetey’s Togolese ancestry (as is also the Togolese descent of quite a remarkable number of prominent Anlo-Ewes) is widely known, even though his Ghanaian and ECOWAS citizenships are also recognizably legitimate. However, if he feels deeply affronted by and/or simply feels that he has an axe to grind with Nana Asante-Bediatuo, who happens to be both a legitimately invested Ghanaian chief and a self-proclaimed New Patriotic Party “sympathizer,” then the deputy finance minister had better restrict his beef, or grievance, to the renowned constitutional lawyer.

Calling Dr. J. B. Danquah, the man whose singular scholastic genius gave us our modern, postcolonial national identity as “Ghanaians” a CIA agent, is a blasphemous heresy that will not be allowed to slide by un-riposted (See “Fiifi Kwetey: How Dare Asante Bediatuo” The Catalyst/Ghanaweb.com 11/24/12).

If, indeed, he wants to fully appreciate the self-fashioned “Outsider Status” of the Anlo-Ewe, which has guided and continues to guide their largely anti-Akan ethnic-separatist status, then Mr. Kwetey had better study the results of the 1956 United Nations-sponsored plebiscite that officially incorporated the erstwhile Trans-Volta Togoland into the newly independent Republic of Ghana.

And although some Anlo-Ewes will vehemently insist that the incorporation of the southern Volta into the erstwhile Gold Coast Colony long preceded the 1956 plebiscite, what is very significant to observe here is the fact that the foregoing major historic event did not prevent the Anlo-Ewes from voting overwhelmingly to join with their kinsfolk in present-day Togo. That these “Anti-Ghana Ghanaians” decisively lost the 1956 plebiscite (largely the result of countervailing votes from Central and Northern Volta) and therefore have came to be fully recognized as bona fide Ghanaians is totally beside the point. Their seemingly incurably treasonous relationship with the country – the Ho epic celebration of the Woyome Scandal is a striking case in point – is a matter of public record.

What is more, with the legitimate exception of the Kotoka-led coup detat of February 24, 1966 that auspiciously ousted the Nkrumah dictatorship, all military putsches that ever occurred in this country against democratically elected governments were staged and/or led by Anlo-Ewes. Of course, the resonant success of such putsches has not been without the flagrant complicity of some weak-minded Akans and non-Akans, particularly low-ranking military personnel from the North, especially during the Rawlings-led putsch that toppled the democratically elected Dr. Hilla Limann-led People’s National Party (PNP).

It is also interesting to observe here that even though Mr. Kwetey accuses Dr. Danquah of having been a CIA agent (a subject which I have quite extensively detailed elsewhere), a humongous 90-percent of the votes cast by residents of the Volta Region, including the Anlo-Ewe, during the 1960 presidential contest between Dr. Danquah and President Nkrumah, went in favor of Mr. Kwetey’s CIA agent! (See Dennis Austin’s Politics in Ghana: 1946-1960).

And so, if one may logically and legitimately ask: Who is being clinically stupid, ignorant and downright idiotic here? But even far more significantly, doesn’t Mr. Kwetey mordantly insult the intelligence of Anlo-Ewes and, in fact, all Ewes and non-Ewe residents of the Volta Region by rather facilely suggesting that their prime choice of a democratic leader was a CIA agent?

On the question of which of the governments of Ghana’s two major political parties have presided over the largest trafficking of narcotic contrabands, just this year at London’s Heathrow Airport, the Mahama-led ruling National Democratic Congress gleefully owned up to the patently inglorious label of “NATIONAL DRUGGOCRATIC CONGRESS.”

And so just what makes Mr. Kwetey presume to dare Nana Asante-Bediatuo so casually to a legitimate contest of patriotism, unless, of course, the deputy finance minister happens to be, characteristically, strung high on cocaine or some such narcotic contraband?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Nov. 25, 2012
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