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

He is the Deputy Propaganda Secretary for the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC), and so it is quite predictable that Mr. Solomon Nkansah should be attempting to deploy the jaded tactic of character assassination in a bid to quashing the presidential ambitions of Ghana's main opposition leader, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who is also a formidable and veritable threat to the wobbly Mahama presidency (See "Akufo-Addo Should Kiss His Presidential Ambition Goodbye - Solomon Nkansah" MyJoyOnline.com 4/12/13).

Unfortunately for Mr. Nkansah, Ghanaians are too enlightened and politically mature and astute to let the personal foibles of Nana Akufo-Addo blind them to the far more visionary and creative and progressive governance alternative that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Presidential Candidate for Election 2012 offers the nation, particularly in the wake of the latest Guinea-Fowl fund-diversion scandal involving the Mahama-Arthur regime and its unmistakable ethno-regional implications for the development of Fourth Republican Ghanaian political culture.

And now speaking of "arrogance," the latter noun descriptive more perfectly encapsulates the attitude, temperament and demeanor of Chairman Jeremiah John Rawlings, the founding patriarch of the National Democratic Congress, than it could ever describe the personality of Nana Akufo-Addo. And so either Mr. Nkansah is darn too shallow-minded and abjectly naive to understand what he is talking about, or he is simply too daft to remarkably appreciate what Ghanaian voters are fervidly looking for, presently, in their leader.

And that leader definitely cannot be one who staunchly and unconscionably backs Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome and his $52 million question. Likewise, the ideal leader that Ghanaian citizens and voters are presently looking for could not be one who privileges gratuitous gratuity payments to retired and flatly rejected parliamentarians over and above promptly and progressively improving the working conditions of Ghanaian health workers and educators. And so, really, when it comes to age or youthful vitality, Mr. John Dramani Mahama has absolutely no worthwhile edge over Nana Akufo-Addo.

Indeed, I had expected Mr. Nkansah to come out swinging with facts and figures decisively confuting, or refuting, sustainable evidence presented by the leaders of the New Patriotic Party to the Atuguba-headed Supreme Court panel hearing the NPP petition. Instead, what we get is effusive incoherence parading as evidence as to why Nana Akufo-Addo ought to have let Messrs. Mahama and Afari-Gyan to literally get away with murder.

And if the Deputy NDC Propaganda Secretary sincerely believes that "age has caught up with Akufo-Addo," then maybe the young misguided hack ought to be reminded of the existence of an 89-year-old substantive Zimbabwean president called Mr. Robert Mugabe, who used to be married to a deceased Ghanaian woman. He may also be equally surprised and, perhaps, even ashamed to learn about the hale and hearty existence of a former Zambian president called Mr. Kenneth Kaunda.

Needless to say, the NDC maintains a considerably longer list of prematurely deceased leaders than the NPP; and the latter situation, of course, largely emanates from the fact of the NDC's being composed of far more violent operatives than any other political organization in postcolonial Ghana.

Indeed, it is a risible mark of idiocy for Mr. Nkansah to believe that Ghanaian voters are far more interested in the age - rather than the health - of their leaders and whatever visionary agenda these leaders may have in propelling the country up on the socioeconomic, technological and cultural ladder. In brief, anybody who believes that President Mahama is a "vibrant" leader, whatever the latter means, must be living in a fool's paradise.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 12, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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