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

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He had the nerve to presume to instruct the chief diplomats of the two most influential and significant countries to postcolonial Ghanaian politics and culture. It is also quite obvious from their embarrassingly “innocent” pronouncements that National Democratic Congress’ apparatchiks like Mr. Kwadwo Twum-Boafo know next to nothing about the game-changing role played by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s America, in particular the promulgation of what came to be globally known as The Atlantic Charter, in expediting the decolonization of many a so-called Third-World country, as well as the significant influence that Great Britain, Ghana’s erstwhile colonial mistress, wields and continues to wield on the geopolitical and cultural destiny of our country.

Which is why most of these NDC operatives talk and carry themselves as if they recently emerged from some Paleolithic caves (See “Twum-Boafo Jabs Jon Benjamin; Calls Bluff of UK, US Statements” 3News.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/15/16). Predictably, as of this writing (11/20/16), the Chief Executive of the so-called Ghana Free Zones Board had been forced to walk back his insufferably uncouth and shamefully undiplomatic rhetoric.

At any rate, those of us who have closely followed his brief career in the political arena had not expected to hear Mr. Twum-Boafo use the polished and well-calibrated language of the cultured and well-educated. After all, isn’t this impudent political upstart “a street boy,” in the practical sense of the term?

Refreshingly, this time around, Foreign Minister Hanna Tetteh appears to have conducted herself with the requisite modicum of dignity befitting the country’s chief diplomat. He may not know this; I mean Mr. Twum-Boafo, of course, but the British High Commissioner to Ghana, Mr. Jon Benjamin, a man whom I quite admire, and his counterpart, U.S. Ambassador Robert P. Jackson, have a far better intelligence network of experts and advisers, both local and foreign, on the ground than can be said of our rag-tag and highly politicized police establishment.

I mean, how can any serious-minded person have confidence in a police establishment that has such an extremely difficult time in effectively investigating a basic open-and-shut case like the crude and brutal assassination of Mr. Joseph Boakye Danquah-Adu, the former New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa North?

Mr. Twum-Boafo also clearly does not know the duties and obligations of formidable global powers and superpowers, thus his rather infantile call for both the UK and the United States to leave Ghana to its own devices. The problem here, though, is that no clear-minded Ghanaian citizen can call the most recent National Democratic Congress’ attempt on the life of the country’s main opposition leader and Nana Akufo-Addo’s family as the purely internal affairs of Ghana.

Had the nearby security forces not intervened, and we are told that this was not even done promptly, the situation may well have escalated into a violent confrontation of national proportions, with significant external reverberations within the West African sub-region.

It may well have been Mr. Benjamin’s threat to revoke visas for all political activists and operatives engaged in the wanton incitement of violence that put the brakes on this blubber-mouth of an NDC communications team member.

However, this cranially stunted butterball is smack on the money, when the Free Zones chief counsels his fellow party hacks not to put the nation “in a position to be dictated to.”

He quickly adds, “We are a sovereign nation.” Maybe somebody more sober and levelheaded ought to remind Mr. Twum-Boafo that sovereign nations are far from being island nations.