Re: “We Just Celebrated A Falsehood.”

I read the article written by Mr. Atta Akyea with the title above, in one of last week's editions of the fiercely pro-New Patriotic Party (NPP) Ghanaian newspaper, The Daily Guide, with considerable interest and mirth. 

Perhaps there are those who will say that Mr. Atta Akyea was being pedantic. In any case, in celebrating the centenary of the birth of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, we were not applauding the fact that he had been born on a particular day. 

The good people of Ghana, actually celebrated the life and work, of the Osagyfo, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah – who always admitted publicly (in his writing) that he did not know the exact day he was born. 

Well, as we are in the realm of pedantry, may I ask, if it has ever occurred to the erudite Mr. Atta Akyea, that in a very real sense, we none of us know exactly how old we are – if we assume that humans ought to calculate their age from the very moment they are conceived? 

Yes, the date of our birth is a useful date (particularly in our dealings with officialdom), but it merely marks the day we exited our mother’s womb, and entered the planet Earth as biologically-independent individuals – over nine long months from the precise moment and date of our conception: an event our parents (whose coming together made possible) were not even aware of!

Coming closer home to himself, since Mr. Atta Akyea is so against falsehood, perhaps he can tell me exactly what he intends to do about a longstanding falsehood that is an unwitting result of his inexplicable silence at the time, when that particularly egregious example of falsehood was published in The Independent newspaper, as a rejoinder to an article of mine, many years ago. 

I raise the matter today, because, as we speak, there is a whispering campaign going on: to the effect that I am a "damager" of people’s reputations – and I gather from a source that one of his loquacious cousins initiated that slanderous campaign against me. 

When I wrote in my column, “Musings of an old man”(which I used to publish in The Independent), that Akufo-Addo, Prempeh & Co., had lost a case  of mine  that they should never have lost, resulting in me losing part of my inheritance, they sent a rejoinder saying in effect that I was an ungrateful man, who did not pay for their services to me, and was ruining their hard-won reputation. 

Yet, nothing could have been farther from the truth: as I did in fact pay them for representing me in that particular case.

As there is apparently a type of amnesia that afflicts ambitious young lawyers, who believe that they stand the chance of being appointed to ministerial positions, in a government led by Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo (one gathers it has a rather longish name: “Doing-a-Nana-Kofi-Coomson-on-an individual-posing-a-threat-to-the-presidential-ambitions-of-Nana-Addo ”), in such matters, I think I must make it absolutely clear to Mr. Atta Akyea that I have a receipt acknowledging payment of one million cedis by me, from Akufo-Addo, Prempeh & Co. and a principled living witness, who will never lie on anyone's behalf (in the shape of my dear 84 year old mother – who is an old Achimotan: still as sharp and alert mentally, as Atta Akyea himself is!) who actually handed the money over to him, at a meeting in the Avenida Hotel. 

We went back to their legal chambers to collect the receipt from him after that meeting, if he recalls.

I am no Nana Kofi Coomson (who foolishly relied on the goodwill and good nature of ruthless, mercenary, and super-ambitious young blades - liable to suffer amnesia in such situations, to corroborate something so important - with an eye on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become ministers in a government led by a President Akufo-Addo) I'll let him know. 

It so happened that after the said article had come to the notice of Nana Addo, he apparently summoned Kwame Akufo, who was then in his salad days at the  bar. 

According to Kwame Akufo himself (recounted to me, during a shouting-match, when I confronted him years later: to demand the return of documents to do with the case!), Nana Addo asked him to go and see Dr. Prempeh, after he had briefed him.

I am not privy to what exactly he said to Nana Addo and Dr. Prempeh that resulted in that falsehood being sent to The Independent as a rejoinder to my article. 

Suffice it to say, that I was pretty livid when I saw it – and it was only the invocation of the name of my late grandfather, P. E. Thompson Esq., by my mother, who pleaded that I let the matter rest there and not write back to refute that outrage, that I did not challenge it. 

The question is, since he full well knows that I did pay Akufo Addo, Prempeh & Co. for that case – and that he accepted that figure to do the case for me, only after he got Yonney to confront me, upon his return from London, and hear it straight from me: that I felt that he had taken advantage of me when he registered four companies for me and charged me a total of one thousand pounds sterling – will he still maintain his silence?

Yonney had made the fatal mistake of asking me to collect the certificates of incorporation and commencement of business, from the Registrar General’s Department myself, before leaving for London: as they were not going to be ready for collection by the time of his departure. 

That was where I was told I had been grossly overcharged by him, and could have got the four companies registered for a fraction of the sum he had charged me. 

Naturally, feeling hard done by, I was certainly not in the mood to pay any more money to Akufo Addo, Prempeh & Co., simply because he (Atta Akyea) had inexplicably dumped the case in the lap of his inexperienced junior, without any explanation to us, his clients. 

I will be charitable and say that perhaps he never knew that such a rejoinder containing the falsehood that I had not paid his cousin’s legal chambers for representing me in the matter against my cousin in the court of Mrs. Justice Dodzie, had been issued and published in The Independent, by their legal chambers.

The proverbial zillion-dollar question is: Now that he does know about it, precisely what does he intend to do about it, in order to set the record straight?

Incidentally, if he actually wants to know the real falsehood in our nation's political history, let him read the report of the Watson Commission, set up by Governor Sir Gerald Creasy (led by Aiken Watson KC), after the disturbances that followed the shooting to death by the police, of some of the leaders of the ex-servicemen, who marched to the Christiansburg Castle in an attempt to present a petition to Governor Creasy.

If he dies so, he will discover that far from being heroes, five of the so-called big six, who adorn some of the paper notes of our currency, were indeed just cowards, who sought to blame Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, for all that had occurred: in order to save their own skins.


Hmmm, Ghana – eyeasem oo: asem ebaba debi ankasa!

Tel:(powered by Tigo - the one mobile phone network in Ghana that actually works!): 027 745 3109.