Akufo-Addo, Once A Nonentity, Now A Nuisance - Part 2

If Akufo- Addo will not shed light on his attachment to cocaine, neither as a user, as some people assert, as a collaborator with international smugglers like Ramond Amankwa and the Dzorwulu-3, nor as the owner of a law firm that defends drug offences, leave him be. He has every right to be arrogant today but in 2012, the voters will subdue him via ‘kokromotire power’ (power of the voting thumb). He will be told that the posture that has taken is not the right one for a presidential applicant who can be relied upon to eradicate the menace from our society. As it turns out, drug involvement is not the best reason for snubbing Nana. The fundamental reason to reject him is that he, by himself, is two of the most incompetent politicians in recent memory, and some more. Should Kuffour have sacked him as he did Edumadze, Osafo Marfo, Bimtim, Kwamena Bartels and others? Yes, but then, no, because he brings a lot of tribal fans to the party. In a way, Nana is like an untalented kid on a soccer team only because he owns the ball. In 2008, after a long inglorious political career, Nana sought the services Larry S. Gibson, an Ivy League-trained election law professor who has directed political campaigns in America since 1968, to help him win the presidential seat in Ghana. Larry was in the U.S. Justice Department as Associate Deputy Attorney General during Jimmy Carter’s admin, and in 1992, he was Maryland State Chairman of the Clinton/Gore presidential campaign. Larry has successfully helped two Africans to become presidents - Marc Ravalomanana(Madagascar, 2002) and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (Liberia, 2006). Nana was to become his third African triumph in Ghana in 2008. In addition to his credentials, Larry is a political Midas any candidate he touches turns to gold, except Nana, who turned to dust on a windy day. Once on board, Larry asked Nana to enumerate his accomplishments so they could strategize, but all Nana could provide in response was a long history of his ancestry and father’s presidency through his own participation in protest marches to his ministerial positions in Kuffour’s cabinet. Larry overruled it on the basis that he wanted to see accomplishments, not family history or past political appointments. Larry was thus insufficiently armed for the job but Nana possessed a contract that had been signed by him so he devised an experimental strategy to which Nana concurred. The strategy was for Nana to portray himself like a president-elect about to be sworn in. It is worth pronouncing here that Nana did not resign on his own as Foreign Affairs Minister, as the law requires, in order to run for president. He was forced out and, even then, he kept using government motorcades, police, cars, drivers, fuel, repair and maintenance for his private campaigns until the opposition parties protested fervently. As part of the unproven strategy, Nana was to overlook his past political work and go about making grandiose promises, celebrating and visiting heads of state of friendly West African countries. He was also to go overseas and meet with NPP supporters but display it to Ghanaians at home as if all their countrymen abroad already accepted him as their next president. It was during that period that he was all over the internet dancing amidst women, four times his size, in Toronto, New York and London. There were two ploys behind the strategy that failed Nana. First, Ghanaians would think that since he was already doing the job there was no need to vote for Mills to start doing it all over again, two, he would be seen as having already won so he would get votes from ill-informed people who just wanted to feel good knowing that they voted for the winner, but as the outcome of the election shows, not everybody was fooled. All indications are that in 2012, Nana will lose again because he would still have no accomplishment to campaign on and Wikileaks has shown that the world outside Ghana knows of the NPP’s lackadaisical attitude to drug eradication to the extent that arrested smugglers were sheltered and even assisted to escape prosecution. All these happened while Nana was the head of the Judiciary in charge of prosecuting drug offenses. Is Nana the best candidate the NPP can offer? No. In the 2008 presidential campaign, even after the voters had rejected the NPP in the primaries, Nana still campaigned on the accomplishments of the NPP because he has none of his own. He has been in politics longer than any one in parliament today, perhaps, but due to his lack of accomplishments, he only crusades as an NPP member and fishes for the slightest opportunities to attack President Mills. Mills, to be sure, is not the best president under the sun, but he is not doing badly enough under the circumstances to be replaced and Nana is certainly a worse alternative. Nana will remain a nuisance to the NPP for years to come.