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

When he boarded the Delta Airlines flight on the night of July 11 at Ghana’s Kotoka International Airport (KIA) and landed at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport some ten hours later, in the morning of July 12 at about half-past-six, Steve Mallory was decidedly a broken man. He had flown business class; but even such relative comfort seemed to agitate him all the more. He had traveled to Ghana full of vim and hope and landed dog-tired and looking almost ten years older than his forty-something years old.

Evidently, at least according to highly placed sources, the man had left New York City for Accra on the hard-nosed mission of extorting some cash that he imperiously felt entitled to from the Akufo-Addo Campaign, only to be rudely awakened and be told off by Mr. Boakye-Agyarko, the New Patriotic Party’s presidential campaign manager for Election 2012.

Sources that witnessed the entire affair would not delve into details, except to simply note that Mr. Mallory’s extortion attempt had so riled Mr. Boakye-Agyarko, a former vice-president with Bank of New York, that he had gruffly called the former “a mercenary,” whereupon the editor-publisher of the Africa Watch magazine had sworn by either the casket of Queenmother Yaa Asantewaa, or that of his own mother, it is not quite clear exactly which, to publish an article confirming the suspicion of his ardent opponents and critics that, indeed, Nana Akufo-Addo had been briefly detained at the John F. Kennedy International Airport over the discovery of an unspecified “small quantity” of good, old Mary-Jane in his carryon luggage, or some such malarkey, upon which the former Akyem-Abuakwa South Member of Ghana’s Parliament and former Foreign Minister had pleaded with customs officials that it was meant for purely personal use and had promptly been shooed through arrival formalities.

In sum, we have been anticipating the latest muck on the reputation and integrity of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for nearly a month now. Interestingly, one of the sources that broke the Mallory extortion scam to yours truly, had absolutely no idea, whatsoever, that I have known “Opanyin” Kwadwo Osei for some twenty-three years now. I gave the informant my assurance that once his back-mailing article, sophistically parading under the guise of a meticulous expose had been published, I intended to go onto the warpath, even as my own surname suggested, by systematically informing his audience what I sincerely knew about the spiv called Steve (Mallory).

And on the latter score must be promptly recalled the fact that during the late summer of 2007, when I serendipitously discovered to my horror that Nana Akufo-Addo had brought Mr. Mallory so dangerously close into his confidence, I immediately observed my great unease to one of my paternal cousins, Okore (a. k. a. Joseph Awuah). I had met Mr. Mallory in the company of Nana Akufo-Addo and Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta, another paternal cousin, at the Cocoa House right here in Bronx, New York. It was at an invitation-only afternoon confab with Ghanaian professionals and academics, a sort of meet-and-greet session that aimed at brainstorming over urgent problems facing our beloved nation that needed to be promptly addressed, in the likely event of the NPP presidential nominee being elected President of Ghana.

Anyway, when I enquired about the role of Mr. Mallory vis-à-vis Nana Akufo-Addo’s campaign tour of Ghanaian communities across the United States, I was told that he was the NPP flagbearer’s “Protocol Officer.” The man also seemed to double as “U. S. Publicist” for the Akufo-Addo Campaign. I squinted at “Opanyin” Kwadwo Osei briefly, gave a sigh of acute chagrin, and quickly turned towards my world-famous cousin, Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta, about whom I had heard so much but was meeting for the very first time and exchanged a few pleasantries with him. It would turn out that, indeed, both of Ken Ofori-Atta’s parents were cousins to my father, with the Databank executive director’s mother being even closer to my father by blood.

Well, the question that I have been mulling ever since the Ewe-Wing of the National Democratic Congress took a Mau-Mau oath to obliterate the reputation, character and integrity of the Presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), is why it took Mr. Mallory some six years to go public with his scandalous, albeit unproven, allegation implicating Nana Akufo-Addo in a drug bust, as it were, at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

In short, what I am relating right now to the reader regards the question of motives. And as a journalist with nearly two-and-half decades’ practical experience, it is the motive of the muck-raking Mr. Mallory that, I strongly feel, ought to be made a major talking-point of our ongoing national discourse on the blotchy quality of Fourth-Republican Ghanaian journalism.

*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of 22 books, including “The New Scapegoats: Colored-on-Black Racism” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###