Stop Comparing Yourself to Ouattara And Unite Your Party: Tein, UDS, Navrongo Chapter Tells Akufo-Addo.

Friends from the media, fellow brothers and sisters of our great Akatamanso family, ladies and gentlemen, you are all welcome. We invited you here this noon to set forward some factual differences between Dr. Alassane Ouattara, the president of Ivory Coast and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the two-time defeated flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party, NPP. Akufo-Addo has on several occasions told Ghanaians to take a look at the good works of the 74 year old president of Ivory Coast and also vote for him to become Ghana’s president at the age of 72. He even made this unsubstantiated request last year when he visited UDS Navrongo campus. As intellectuals in this university we have gathered here to compare the two figures, submit their academic, public service and internal political records to certain profound chemical interrogations, and then take them through some litmus test. This will help us as students to know if Nana Addo can perform when elected as president of Ghana, God forbid, at the age of 72.

First of all, we will consider the juxtaposition of their academic credentials. In vivid brief, Dr. Alassane Outtara received a BSc. Degree in Business Administration from the Drexel Institute of Technology which is now called Drexel University, Philadelphia in 1965 with impeccable academic scores. He then obtained both his Master’s Degree in Economics in 1967 and a PhD in Economics in 1972 from the University of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, Akufo-Addo graduated from the University of Ghana, Legon in 1967 where he obtained BSc. Degree in Economics with a deplorable Third Class Division. He later gained admission into Oxford University but was sacked which his own pals said it was as a result of his drug use. We have also been told that he entered the Court of Inns, Middle Temple under a circumstances that was not clear because it was bizarre to see a Third Class student entering the Court of Inns, Middle Temple. In 1975, he was called to the Ghana Bar, when indeed; no one knows how and where he acquired his law certificate. Considering the above histories, one will have no choice than to conclude that the 71 year old presidential hopeful, when elected as president of Ghana, will perform abysmally.

Another interesting area to analyse is the public service records of the two politicians. Dr. Alassane Dramane Ouattara is an international icon owing to his admirable economic backgrounds. The astute economist worked with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, D.C from 1968 to 1973, and was later appointed a special advisor to the Governor and Director of Research between 1975 and 1982. He was then appointed a Governor of Central Bank of West African States in 1988. He led the Ivorian’s Inter-ministerial Committee for Coordinating of the Stabilization and Economic Recovery Programme under the IMF Structural Adjustment Programme in 1990 and was made the Prime Minister of Cote d’Ivoire in the same year. Finally, Dr. Alassane Dramane Ouattara was made Deputy Managing Director of the IMF from 1994 to 1999. He is well known as a hard-worker, keen on transparency and good governance. These portrayed the marks of a true personality who can assure his people of a tremendous output even in his 100s as a president.

Meanwhile, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo left the Middle Temple without even doing his pupillage to be certified and we all know the Middle Temple would not certify a candidate who failed to do pupillage. He joined Coudert and Freves, a US law firm based in France as an administrator from 1971 to 1975 and a junior member of the Chambers of U.V. Campbell from 1975 to 1979. He then co-founded Akufo-Addo, Prempeh and co. with Dr. Edmund Prempeh in 1979. In 2001, Akufo-Addo was appointed Minister of Justice and Attorney General by former President J.A. Kufuor under who’s outfit NPP apparatchiks including K.T. Hammond sold GNPC’s Drill Ship at US$ 24 million to defray a judgement debt of US$19.5 million to Societe’ Generale without the knowledge of or involvement of GNPC, and this was done based on Akufo-Addo’s advice as the Attorney General. Till date, Ghanaians do not know the whereabouts of the proceeds generated from the sale of the Drill Ship. It was not surprising when Akufo-Addo entitled the historic case between astute lawyer Tsatsu Tsikata and the State as “Tsatsu versus Kufuor”. His incompetence exhibited at the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General led to a bizarre reshuffle that sent him to the Foreign Affairs Ministry in April 2005 under the erstwhile President J.A. Kufuor’s administration. Before he left the Justice Ministry, dockets got missing for reasons known to the whole world. As if that was not enough, he connived with NPP cronies and looted government lands around Airport Residential areas, Cantoments, Ridge and many others. As a reputable lawyer he claimed to be, he was not able