It Is Important That We Not Treat President Akufo Addo The Same Way That We Treated Former President Mahama

It appears that Melania Trump and Nana Akufo Addo completed the same course in Plagiarism at Trump University, the only difference being that Melania actually took credit for her “work”, saying with pride that she wrote her speech with very little help. Nana Addo has left his speechwriter to take the fall for his inaugural faux pas, which leaves many people (myself included) feeling some kind of way. All that NPP talk about personal accountability rings sort of hollow in the wake of this unofficial response to what is now an internationally recognized blunder. It’s one thing for the condescending Western media to carry a story…it’s a different beast entirely when Al Jazeera turns your error into headline. That’s how you know you’ve really FUBAR’d your job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhLRULi_DJo

We can’t really feign shock at President Akufo Addo’s (or his aide’s) propensity for passing someone else’s work off as his own, can we? First of all, the New Patriotic Party has such an extensive and enduring hard on for being associated with the Republican Party – going as far as boasting about their twin elephant mascots and the coincidence of their parallel tenures in power – that they will do anything to imitate big brother…including, but not limited to pilfering intellectual property from Democrats politicians.

And let’s not act like NPP hasn’t been here before. The party that was supposed to represent a “change” in Ghanaian thinking and attitudes exhibited the same cultural proclivities for taking creative/intellectual property and passing it off as their own on several occasions. It is almost a year to the day that Kow Essuman – self-professed personal aide to then candidate Nana Addo – said that he would send back any invoice requesting payment for the unauthorized use of intellectual property by his party with a “NONSENSE” stamped on it.

We don’t pay people and we don’t attribute sources, either!!!!

It is now obvious that Nana Addo’s campaign team learned nothing from the experience. After all, since at the time they were only taking advantage of a lowly Ghanaian visual artist, their arrogance was warranted. It turns out that behavior was just a dress rehearsal for something much grander! On Inauguration Day, author Nana Awere Damoah playfully asked if those who had access to the brochure could spot any typos, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Brochuregate that dogged and embarrassed the country during the 2016 Independence celebrations. In a bid to outdo that gaffe, NPP saved the sweetest pepper for the proverbial waakye for the last. The PRESIDENT was going to parrot your favorite philanderer and warmonger and mine in 3-2-1…!

What a wow.

In an August 2016 interview with NTV, Hugh Masekela called Africans ‘bad imitations of those who oppressed us’. He intimated that Westerners don’t come to Africa to see Africans. They come to see the animals and the natural wonders, but don’t come to see US. Why? Because we are slowly, steadily, progressively losing our heritage and cultural identities in all spheres, politics and diplomatic relations most of all. Someone made the very poignantly observed hat in the history of all the brilliant and globally recognized thinkers that Nana Addo (or his aide) could have plagiarized, not ONE was an African. They had their pick from Patrice Loch Otieno Lumumba, Nelson Mandela to Ghana’s own Kofi Anan to draw “inspiration” from, but it appears these Black men weren’t good enough. Instead, they opted to cull from the inaugural speeches of Bill Clinton, JFK and George Bush, the lattermost whose excerpt was originally quoted by Woodrow Wilson, America’s 28^th president who believed that Jim Crow and segregation was a benefit for Negroes. 

But you see, we cannot drag President Akufo Addo in the way that that they deserved, and certainly not in the way that their social media foot soldiers spent months dragging now Ex-President Mahama, because it’s Nana Akufo Addo and NPP at the helm, and both he and his party are purrrrfect. Did they not assure us on the campaign trail that the battle is Lord’s? Surely as its victors, Nana Addo is God’s anointed and appointed president and therefore impervious to imperfections? Major Prophet Sekou Nkrumah told us as much when he published this (misleading) meme of his father and a bespectacled boy on his personal Facebook page a few weeks ago.

Sekou wanted us to believe that this was a picture of his late father and Nana Addo as a boy. Turns out this was a kid from the South…of America.

Oh yeah. The party faithful loved that. Drank it up like Kalypo. The prophesy had come to pass!

As already mentioned, we cannot treat President Akufo Addo the same way Ghanaians treated John Mahama. Because reasons. And it is for those reasons that I posit the following questions as though there were being asked of Dramani Mahama and not his successor.

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Wow. So are really supposed to believe that after fighting for this position for 28+ years, you Mr. President didn’t have some exclusive, personal thoughts on what you wanted to say to the Ghanaian people? You haven’t been working on an inaugural speech since the 90’s? You didn’t have enough time to craft your own notables and quotables? Because I know if I had been rejected as many times for the office of the president as you have, I’d have some things I’d want to get off my chest. I’d have some things that needed saying, and I certainly ain’t pulling the words of Clinton and Wilson to reflect my mood. Is this what the words “I am a Ghanaian” represent now? Red, white, blue and Bush?

When I published my first book and had my first launch, I knew exactly what I was going to say and how I was going to say it. I may have run my ideas by a few people, but those were MY words. And when I drew inspiration from other authors, I certainly gave them credit because I know how long and arduous it is to think and write something memorable. Did your speechwriters run the inaugural address by you first and vice-versa? Did you approve it? Because if you did, it means you hired incompetent, unscrupulous speechwriters. How are the Ghanaian people supposed to have the confidence that you will hire competent, honest ministers, engineers and the like to steer the country towards much needed change? Why are you surrounding yourself with people who don’t even have the foresight to bring you water on a Harmattan day? Incompetence!

Furthermore, I knew exactly what I was going to wear.

And who decided for you to wear that kente? (The colors and theme of which I loved, by the way.) But WHO? Eh? It’s admirable that you harbor such body positive feelings about yourself and all, but don’t you think it was a little too early to introduce your mitties (man titties) to the nation? Every time you adjusted that massive cloth, we saw belly and moobies. Was there no ntama available? What about modesty? What about this generation that is looking up to you for guidance? Do you want big-breasted boys and girls to also be flashing their flesh for the public? I guess when you’ve made it to the top, you can bare it all, our sensory receptors and nightmares be damned.

Honestly, I’m glad the inauguration address was hampered by such and epic mess. I don’t know what Ghana would do if the office of the presidency weren’t a constant embarrassment to the nation, which is why I am grateful to the sitting leader of the nation.

What a way to launch.

You had ONE job, and all the slangs in the world can’t cover the fact that far too much of your speech was a sad carbon copy of white male thought and therefore, subversively, spoke to the white supremacist that is latent in every Ghanaian. How are we supposed to fight it when our leadership keeps nourishing it? You admit that our challenges are fearsome while quoting verbatim the words of an American. Chai!

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But we must never challenge or  ask these questions of a purrrrfect president who represents a puuuurfect party. Nana Addo and his team would never be guilty of such laziness and pathetic faux pas. They assured us as much while they were trolling their opposition and trolled their way to victory. Only John Mahama and NDC would do such a thing. This is why I have taken the liberty of introducing you to your new Commander in Chief, Nana Dramani Mahamaddo.

Because NPP is perfect and because change as come.

No. SHUT UP over there! Don’t tell me to chill. Do you know what it’s like to be waken from sleep with alerts from your Nigerian friends laughing at you? And to watch people you’re supposed to respect working over time to defend the sort of nonsense they devoted a years to decrying. YOU shut up!