Opinion: Akufo-Addo Spoke Like a Thinker and an Astute Student of History- By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Ghana’s President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo/Photo: The Impact Crew

It is quite understandable that National Democratic Congress’ leaders like Mr. Yaw Boateng Gyan, the former National Organizer of the country’s main opposition political party, should have a difficult time appreciating the diachronic perspective offered his Al-Jazeera interviewer by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on the question of Ghana’s stance on the existence and practice of homosexuality in the country (See “Homosexuality Is ‘Lunatic Behavior’ But President Was ‘Right’ – Kweku Baako” Peacefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/29/17). At any rate, what is rather amusing here is that Ghana’s statutory or constitutional stance on homosexuality was inherited from our erstwhile British colonial overlords.

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If any of these pathologically conservative and gratuitous critics of Nana Akufo-Addo can be made to appreciate this fundamental fact of history, then, perhaps, parochially minded political operatives like Mr. Boateng Gyan can begin to understand that the movement of history is fluxional. For instance, just as there once existed a precolonial Ghana in which Ghanaians determined their own affairs and destiny, through the establishment and management of institutions set up for those purposes, before the apocalyptic and the paradigmatic shift represented by European colonial imperialism, and now the postcolonial reassertion of our sovereignty, it is all too logical to anticipate the fact that the ostracization of the LGBTQI community of Ghanaians is bound to change, for good or bad, with time.

Human morality and thought have been constantly evolving since the beginning of time, and it is inescapably and unpardonably absurd to suppose that the course of human and cosmic evolution is, somehow, going to be permanently frozen at some point in time. Any Ghanaian adult citizen who does not understand this elementary fact has no business pretending to be a leader. As for the question of whether homosexuality is a “lunatic behavior,” as claimed by Mr. Abdul-Malik Kweku Baako, it is a purely subjective and speculative fact that is not based on a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos or the complexities of the workings of the universe. Rather, the renowned Editor-Publisher of the New Crusading Guide based his assertion and conviction on his sociocultural upbringing as a contemporary Ghanaian citizen.

To be certain, many aspects of our present cultural practices did not exist a little over a century or two ago. What both President Akufo-Addo and Mr. Baako deeply appreciate but which the likes of Messrs. Boateng Gyan, Alhassan Suhuyini and even Speaker Aaron Michael Oquaye, himself a quite distinguished lawyer in his own right, may be having a hard time coming to terms with is the fact that the current public discourse on homosexuality is fundamentally one verging on human rights, even the inalienable rights of people whose lifestyle may be deemed to deviate from the lifestyle of the so-called Moral Majority. And here ought to also be promptly remarked that it was this same Moral Majority, on both sides of the Atlantic, which not very long ago greedily and rapaciously created a global economic system based on the patently uncivilized sale of African humanity.

Indeed, any person who is incapable of thinking in terms of temporal relativity of culture and morality does not qualify to participate in the present debate. Which, of course, would preclude nearly every key operative of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress.

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