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

There is a Ghana News Agency (GNA) news report circulating on the Internet falsely claiming that the Obama Administration is in full support of the veritable bog-peat that is the ongoing New Patriotic Party (NPP) petition hearings before the Supreme Court of Ghana (See "US Applauds Ghana's Political Institutions In The Wake Of Election Petition" MyJoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 5/11/13).

The said article is full of the kind of propagandistic sophistry which the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) has inimitably mastered and perfected with unenviable notoriety. For starters, if the Obama Administration wanted to dispatch a message resoundingly applauding the way and manner in which the Akufo-Addo/NPP election petition is being handled, such approbation would not be issued through a Ghana News Agency reporter on a study tour of the United States, as part of a routine professional enlightenment and enrichment package annually organized and hosted by the U. S. Department of State, or Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Needless to say, such a progressive and image-boosting message would have been retailed and/or relayed through the resident American chief diplomat or ambassador in Accra. Secondly, anybody who has been sedulously watching the trajectory of the Akufo-Addo/NPP petition is fully and embarrassingly aware of dastardly and relentless attempts by President Mahama, with the shameless complicity and collusion of Presidents Alassane Ouattara and Thomas Yayi Boni, of the Ivory Coast and Benin, respectively, to brazenly stampede and abort Ghanaian democracy.

Indeed, contrary to what the anonymous GNA reporter would have the rest of the world believe, but for the dogged and steely determination of the 2012 presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party and his associates, the entire institutional process of electoral redressing would have been cavalierly bulldozed by the key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress, with the flagrant and unconscionable support of former Nigerian strongman Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, the man who led the dubious ECOWAS group of election observers into the country and curiously, albeit quite predictably, claimed that Ghana's most massively rigged general election was also the finest of its kind in the entire West African sub-region in the postcolonial era.

And dear reader, do you wonder why the primeval continent's march towards the democratic rule of law and order is as dispiriting as it presently is? Even more significant must be highlighted the fact that the aforementioned Ghana News Agency reporter specifically and categorically solicited the official opinion of Mr. Michael Pelletier, the deputy assistant secretary of public diplomacy and public affairs, as well as African affairs in the United States' Department of State.

And on the preceding score, it goes without saying that even a cursory glance at the rather unusually long job description of Mr. Pelletier is enough to adequately inform a toddler of the fact that the most deserving pabulum of a response was what the American diplomatic official gave the obviously naive and exuberant GNA reporter.

You see, government-sponsored media operatives like our unnamed Ghana News Agency reporter, who participated in the 2013 Spring Professional Fellows Program here in the United States, ought to be frankly admonished about the glaring fact that recklessly gussying up patent falsehoods, such as the inescapably benighted manner in which the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress regime and the Afari-Gyan-chaperoned Electoral Commission handled the NPP petition, as a remarkable example of Ghanaian democracy, does little to effectively advance democratic political culture in both Ghana and the African continent at large.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
May 14, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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