Opinions of Monday, 13 February 2012

Columnist: Boateng, Chris Gyamfi

I cannot sleep with Akuffo Addo as president!

“No, no, no; it’s not safe, it’s not safe…I cannot sleep with Akuffo Addo as president!!…”

Fellow Ghanaian reading me, the above lamentations, tacit revelations and outright rejection and denunciation comes from no other person than a staunch NPP supporter and a bosom friend of NPP’s defeated 2008 presidential candidate William Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo. That was Chronicle’s Kofi Koomson whose newspaper also serves as an un-officio mouthpiece to the NPP which shakes like an individual suffering from a frost bite whenever narcotics drugs are mentioned.

In fact, Kofi Koomson’s uncompromising stand against his bosom friend and flagbeaerer should not be underrated because like the proverbial frog emerging from beneath the waters to announce the death of the crocodile, there is no doubt that the newspaper personnel knows William Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo from inside-out and out-side in than ordinary Ghanaians.

Readers may recall that Kofi Koomson was with Akuffo Addo in the trenches and avidly used his newspaper to support and tout him when the latter embarked on his useless and bloody “kume preko” demonstrations. Indeed, Kofi Koomson’s indictment of his friend gives us a vivid insight and accurate description of Akuffo Addo which debunks the mystery surrounding the man, that he is decisive, an ace lawyer and an intelligent person who is up to the task of running Ghana. Indeed, we gather from Kofi Koomson’s assessment that not only is Akuffo Addo an imposter who doesn’t believe in what he says and doesn’t say what he believes in but the man is also a reckless, dangerous, violent, temperamental, lousy, a loser, and intellectually bankrupt whose knowledge in legal issues is very questionable.

From the tape recording in which Kofi Koomson engaged in his catharsis, we note that Akuffo Addo failed miserably during his legal spar with Tsatsu Tsikata. Before Kofi Koomson’s revelation however, we got to know that this so-called NPP’s legal luminary charged Tsatsu with a wrong legal jargon; instead of charging him as the state (of Ghana) dealing with the culprit, the then NPP’s Attorney General titled his charge sheet as “The President V Tsatsu” denoting that the issue at stake was a personal matter between the then president of Ghana and the accused. This is was/is an ace lawyer we’re made to believe and celebrate!. But listen o the kicker here: Kofi Koomson was emphatic that William Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo as the Attorney General and Minister of Justice could not write the summary of that case but rather prevailed on Henry Kwasi Prempeh, an NPP activist and a law professor domiciled in the USA to write the summary for him. Mind you that Kwasi Prempeh was not part of the government’s legal team and therefore his involvement at that stage was/is questionable. Fellow Ghanaians, there is this aphorism that coming events cast their shadows and therefore it wasn’t out of place when Kofi Koomson took such a stand against his own friend and a flagbearer of a party he belongs. For as a prelude to events to come, Kofi Koomson served as a harbinger to Wikileaks which expatiated and buttressed what had been put in the public domain concering his bosom friend and added more ammunition to the pervasive nature of this disgruntled character dying to be president of Ghana.

Ironically, instead of Akuffo Addo taking a humbling approach to wane himself off his massive failure in public office, the man is saying this year’s elections in Ghana will be based on dereliction of duty and oncorruption; hahaha! When did dereliction of duty and corruption become a lingua franca for Akuffo Addo? Was it a dereliction of duty when he elected to do nothing when fellow Ghanaians were massacred in the Gambia when he was the foreign affairs minister? Was it a dereliction of duty when he proffered wrong charges against the murderers of Ya-Na when he was the attorney general and also failed to appeal the case when the government lost? Was it dereliction of duty when Akuffo Addo failed to prosecute the three women from Dzowulu who were busted at the KIA with narcotics in their “you-know-where?” Did Akuffo Addo neglect to prosecute these three women because they pay allegiance to the NPP or because he is complicit himself in the narcotics business himself? How come the women and their docket got missing into thin air under Akuffo Addo’s watch? Was it corruption when Akuffo Addo refused to return official vehicles allocated to him even though he had resigned as the A-G and Foreign Affairs Minister? Was it corruption that saw the missing of Ghanaian diplomatic passports which eventually found their way in the hands of drug barons like Raymond Amankwaa, Akuffo Addo’s in-law who is serving a jail term for narcotics related offense? Now, talking of dereliction of duty, can Akuffo Addo be bold enough to point out a singular significant achievement he can boast of as an MP for his Akyem Abuakwa constituency when he served as their MP for almost a decade? Aren’t the roads in that constituency in deplorable condition, not to mention the massive unemployment among the youth in the area, culminating in the deadly galamsey business?

Akuffo Addo must be told without mincing words that from what we’ve known from his own friend, from Wikileaks and from his lousy and negligible performance as a public official and an MP, he is unfit to preside over a district assembly, let alone to lead our dear country.

Be that as it may, a Ghanaian lawmaker in the person of Mr. Twumasi Appiah has added his voice to the challenges from Kofi Wayo and most Ghanaian newspapers that Akuffo Addo should submit himself to a drug test at Korle Bu Hospital. Will this so-called decisive man and an ace lawyer take up the challenge to shame his critics once and for all or he will run away from Korle Bu while “nobody taa no do?.

Chris Gyamfi Boateng, aka Koo Boateng