Opinion: His “Affected English” Won Akufo-Addo Election 2016 Big Time – By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jnr., Ph.D.

I don’t have much time, so I intend to be extremely brief here. The fact of the matter is that I wasn’t going to dignify Mr. Tony Pobee-Mensah’s pontifical poppycock about what the clearly self-infatuated Akufo-Addo critic calls the “Affected English” of the President of Ghana, and how even Mr. Pobee-Mensah’s “mixed-race” American-born daughter seizes every chance to speak Twi. He does not tell us which version or dialect of Twi his daughter speaks (See “Akufo-Addo’s ‘Affected’ English” Ghanaweb.com 3/14/18). I wasn’t going to weigh in on this patently puerile and narcissistic display of insufferable arrogance on the part of the critic, because there are far more pressing issues of national significance to write about than the hang-up of an obviously vainglorious public attention seeker. On the other hand, I find it morally inexpedient to let this clinically uncouth and pathologically self-absorbed critic get away with his inexcusably offensive and totally gratuitous attack on the free-speech rights of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Asia 728x90

The first question that crossed my mind regarded the fact of whether this is the first time that Mr. Pobee-Mensah has heard Ghana’s former Justice and Foreign Minister speak the English language. And even as my wife poignantly queried: Are all Ghanaians market women? And if these market women have a difficult time understanding the accent of the President, are there no other neighbors, relatives and friends of these market women to explain it to them? And did he ever hide his very familiar “Affected English Accent” the three times that Nana Akufo-Addo gunned for the Presidency, including his massive and unprecedented win in December 2016? At any rate, who said that all Ghanaians have a homogeneous accent when it comes to speaking either any of our indigenous or local languages or any foreign language, including our country’s official language of business, to wit, English? Then also, who ever said that all Ghanaians have the same facility and ambitions or preferences when it comes to spoken English or any other language, for that matter?

It also does not seem to occur to the Akufo-Addo critic that one’s natural aptitude and level and quality of one’s education, as well as familial status and cultural orientation, upbringing and exposure, all have a lot to do with one’s linguistic facility and/or delivery. And so what is really the problem with Mr. Pobee-Mensah who seems to think that, somehow, his “mixed-race” daughter has a superior claim to the “correct” pronunciation or phonetical delivery of the English language than the partly British-raised Nana Akufo-Addo? Clearly, the critic appears to be morbidly afflicted with the cognitively paralytic bug of Inferiority Complex which, by the way, he cannot in any way, whatsoever, blame on President Akufo-Addo. Indeed, even as one of the commentators on Mr. Pobee-Mensah’s anti-Akufo-Addo tirade aptly pointed out, it is routine for nonnative speakers of any language to aspire to speak as clearly and closer to the accent of native speakers as possible. My own late father, a maternal cousin of Nana Akufo-Addo’s, taught speech and theater/drama to American-born students at several colleges, including a half-dozen colleges of the City University of New York and several others in New Jersey.

There is absolutely no need to make any individual or specific comparisons here, but it is an incontrovertible fact that the “Ghanaian English” of some of our leaders makes those of us with speech and public-speaking training and a professional appreciation of the language want to duck for cover under our beds and couches. I also don’t know how Mr. Pobee-Mensah feels about this – not that it would matter anyhow – but anytime that I see an English-speaking African leader appear on international television networks, such as CNN and BBC, with bold subtitles streaming at the foot of the television screen, primarily because of his/her heavy and barely coherent “African Accent,” I don’t take the least bit of pride in such rhetorical/phonetical infelicity. You see, dear reader, all languages are artifacts with endemically or inherently woven stylistic edges to them. Which is why it is very common to hear listeners with a refined or an educated taste for the beauty of languages spontaneously remark on just how articulate or linguistically prepossessing a particular speaker is.

In our part of the world, for instance, the rhetorical felicity of political legends like Drs. J, B Danquah, K. A Busia and K.K Kurankye-Taylor; and Messrs. Julius K. Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Robert Mugabe, Tafawa Balewa, Kofi Annan and, yes, Nana Akufo-Addo, are a matter of public record.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com  Ghanaffairs

The views expressed by this author remain solely their own and are not to be taken as the view of the Editorial Board of www.africanewsanalysis.com,  www.zongonews.com and ZongoNews Radio & TV