It’s been quite a while since this patently and indescribably comical and morally irrelevant story made the banner news headlines, so I am not certain what the response of the main target of intimidation, a characteristic and a typical weapon of the leadership and the rank-and-file membership of the now-ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) was or had been.
I have been keeping this story on file for approximately some three months now, and was even about to delete it, until I came to the rather curious realization that since the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse snatched an unprecedentedly seismic victory in last December’s General Election, the man who was the prime target of what had been erroneously tagged as a rancid act of “hypocrisy” and “defamation” had been curiously and conspicuously silent from the national political terrain, landscape and culture for quite a remarkable while now.
And on the latter count, of course, we are talking about Mr. Fiifi “Tiafi” Kwetey, the General-Secretary of the Mahama 2.0-led and chaperoned institutional establishment of the National Democratic Congress. Well, the news story that I have right in front of me here is actually about the wife of “The Tiafi Man,” when one critically reads in-between the proverbial lines, although the real and the main target of obloquy, that is, if we could even legitimately characterize it as such, is the “Night-Soil Seller” himself.
Those too young among our fold to remember who a “Night-Soil Man” was, this euphemistic epithet was very common and current in the heydays of the pit-latrine and the box-and-bucket outhouses, as they are commonly known and called in rural America, and referred to strong and strapping men who were contracted to carry “Anadwo Koko” or “nocturnally prepared corn corridge.” The job was predominantly undertaken by dirt-poor and lower-class northern-descended Ghanaians with a scattered mixture of some natives from some of our neighboring West African countries. For some reason still not very clear to Yours Truly, the “sacred work” of “Night-Soil Carriers” had become virtually synonymous with the word “Kruu” or “Kruufuo,” the Akan-language corruption or, perhaps, more appropriately, “Creole” or “The Creole People,” sometimes also spelled as “Krio,” at the time that Yours Truly was growing up in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.
“Kru” or “Kruufuo” was an obvious reference to mixed culture and sometimes mixed race people from Sierra Leone and Liberia, that is, returnees from the Americas in the aftermath of the globally infamous Transatlantic Slave Trade, if my secondary school era recollection of my West African Human Geography lessons retains some of its epistemic validity. I would later ask my father why the profession or the occupation of “Night-Soil Porters” had become virtually synonymous with the ethnicity of the Creole people of Sierra Leone and Liberia, a partly African Diaspora-Descended People, largely returnees from The Caribbean and the Post-Slavery United States of America.
The Old Man would inform me that it was President Tolbert, or one such Liberian leader, who had paid an official visit to Ghana in either the late 1950s or the early 1960s, during the tenure or the Presidency of President Kwame Nkrumah, who had declared in a speech delivered in Accra, Ghana’s capital, that Liberia had become a going concern or a prosperous nation, so it was well past time for the teeming pool of destitute and vagabond indigenes of Liberia stranded in Ghana to return home with dignity and assist in the massive reconstruction that was taking place in the former American colony, in order to make Liberia a great and a prosperous nation like Ghana, just as their formerly enslaved African ancestors had done in the United States of America for some three, or so, centuries.
At any rate, I find the rather insufferable and scandalously haughty demand by the group of gangsters and hired thugs calling itself The National Soldiers for John Mahama for the operators of the passionately pro-New Patriotic Party (NPP) radio stations, in the main, Asaase Radio, Oman-FM and Wontumi-FM, to immediately retract and apologize for supposedly and allegedly defaming “the spouse of the NDC General Secretary” to be both obstreperously asinine and comical, if also because it is unarguably an open secret that Mr. Fiifi “Tiafi” Kwetey achieved his political notoriety and prominence by making a staple diet out of the deliberate and criminal defamation of his main political opponents of the New Patriotic Party.
Those days, in the early 2000s, the Aflao native, from the Ketu-South Constituency, in the Volta Region, held the executive title of National Propaganda Secretary of the National Democratic Congress. These days, the latter party’s portfolio of National Propaganda Secretary has been strategically relabeled as the National Communications Officer. Until immediately after the December 2020 General Election, or thereabouts, the faux-socialist sounding portfolio of the National Democratic Congress’ National Propaganda Secretary was held with inimitable vengeance by Mr. Samuel “Sammy” Gyamfi, a fast-rising social climber and a smooth-operating political opportunist and Commander-in-Chief of the Ballot-Snatching Post-Election Thugs of the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia-commandeered National Democratic Congress.
Well, the issue that inspired this writeup, as it is commonly called in Ghana these days, has to do with the aforementioned NPP-leaning radio stations having, somehow, “incredulously” broadcast the imminent possibility of Mrs. Naomi Kwetey’s appointment to a Senior Position at the Bank of Ghana, purely on the basis of her conjugal bond with “The Tiafi Man,” rather than primarily on the basis of her own longstanding and hard-won personal achievements as a banker with such major financial institutions as Trust Bank and Ecobank.
Now, the foregoing anger-provoked testimony from Mr. Joshua Sika-Nartey, described as President of the National Soldiers for John Mahama, may very well be factually and forensically unquestionable and/or unarguable. But it also undoubtedly holds and absolutely goes without saying that being married to “The Tiafi Man” is highly unlikely to hurt the chances of Mrs. Naomi Kwetey’s being named to a top executive position at the Bank of Ghana, in pretty much the same way that being the son of “The Mosquito Man” has not the least bit jeopardized or militated against the appointment of Mr. Asiedu-Nketia’s Bloemfontein, South Africa, educated son from grabbing a plum and a cushy job at the statutorily legitimized Galamsey industrial enterprise that is the so-called GOLDBOD Company or Corporation. Now, you say Allah; and I say Wallahi!
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 18, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]
