By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe

It is well-composed and quite carefully calculated to sow doubts in the minds of both staunch supporters and swing/floating voters leaning heavily towards the three-time Presidential Candidate of Ghana’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) – (See “Full Africawatch Report: Akufo-Addo Has Cancer” 8/30/16).

The reporter also uses his intimate knowledge and remarkably long association with Ghana’s former Foreign Minister and shortly before that the country’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice to quite fascinating effect.

But, of course, the sometime cordial and some may even say, intimate, relationship between hatchet man Steve “Spiv” Malory and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has been on the rocks for at least a half-decade now. And so whatever has been published by the editor-publisher of Africawatch and paraded as foolproof state of the health of the 72-year-old Nana Akufo-Addo is largely stale information grotesquely exaggerated, or hyped up, to seem up-to-date and alarming.

For instance, how could a man allegedly afflicted with a terminal stage of prostate cancer whose normal Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) count ought to range no higher than 19.9 nanograms per millimeter (ng/ml), at the most extreme, be walking sprightly and robustly campaigning for President of Ghana with a PSA count of 89.9, or more than 4 times the most extreme PSA count?

One need not possess a college degree – and Mr. Malory is not known to possess a college degree – to draw the readily outrageous conclusion that Akufo-Addo is the proverbial “Dead Man Walking.” But what is even more fascinating to learn, perusing Mr. Malory’s article, is that, in fact, Nana Akufo-Addo has been literally campaigning for the presidency for at least some four years in someone else’s body or as a poltergeist, a ghost!

For most of the supposedly expert medical records on the subject’s condition of health, heavily annotated with superfluous editorials, date from January through June 2013.

The writer is clever enough to appreciate the fact that like himself, quite a remarkable percentage of Ghanaians are not analytically inclined. And so he is able to carelessly concoct such thoroughgoing poppycock and pass the same off as medical gospel on the purportedly extremely poor health condition of the former New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa South.

As for the alleged enlargement of the heart of the three-time Presidential Candidate of the NPP, even as a lay person vis-à-vis the medical practice, I can readily point to any number of humans of all races, nationalities and cultures who have been living with cardiac enlargement and going about their daily lives perfectly almost as if they were born only yesterday.

And then even as a very smart Malory critic pointed out, a person with extreme renal/kidney ailment would not be giving the 58-year-old President John Dramani Mahama such stiff competition on the campaign trail, such as the NPP leader did in the Western Region recently. He would have been hooked onto dialysis machines around the clock.

In essence, Mr. Malory may be felicitous in his malice towards Nana Akufo-Addo, but he definitely does not come off as a very honest and intelligent man.

Were he about the good fortunes of Ghanaians, the Africawatch’s editor-publisher would also have combed around for the medical records of the pathologically corrupt Mr. Mahama and have the same published for public interest and instruction.

He would have even had occasion to frankly speculate, as he does with Nana Akufo-Addo, on any medical factors that may account for the gross incompetence of the man whose own political godfather and patron, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, recently described as unarguably the most corrupt and morally bankrupt personality ever to occupy the Flagstaff House.