It ought to have come as absolutely no news at all that Ms. Hanna Tetteh, the half-Hungarian and half-Ghanaian former John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama-appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs, would not either be applying for or accepting any cabinet portfolio appointment from the second nonconsecutively elected Mahama regime. For the simple reason that over the bulk of the entire duration of some 8 years that the Mahama-led institutional establishment of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was effectively shunted into opposition, the Awutu-Senya native, from the Central Region, had been fiercely fighting for the quite decent and high-end diplomatic portfolio which she recently secured as the United Nations’ Special Envoy to Libya (See “Hannah[sic] Tetteh Speaks on Not Getting an Appointment from President Mahama” Ghanaweb.com 2/7/25).
It was a position that she almost did not get because as this author warned Ms. Tetteh almost 10 years ago, her patently infantile and diplomatically inadvisable decision to butt heads with the extant United States’ Ambassador to Ghana, Mr. Robert Jackson, from the Deep-South State of Arkansas, if memory serves serves Yours Truly accurately, was literally tantamount to shooting herself in the foot, and I had warned her at the time in a couple, or so, columns that she was almost certain to face some formidable stumbling blocks, if she intended to professionally advance beyond the parochial shores of Ghana. And true to my prediction, she would be repeatedly denied this most significant and high-profile portfolio that promised to make her a respectable force to reckon with on the global diplomatic scene, in ways that the decidedly localized portfolio of being Ghana’s Foreign Minister could not afford her in the offing.
The bone of contention, as I vividly recall at the time, had to do with the fact of whether, indeed, cabinet members of the first Mahama government had really agreed to having their official salaries reduced by 10-percent as a politically fetching strategy of facilitating the rapid construction of the so-called Community Health Clinics or CHPS Compounds, if memory, here too, serves me accurately. It would shortly turn out that, indeed, though he had officially denied butting into the internal affairs of Ghana, Ambassador Jackson was dead-on-target to have questioned the integrity and the genuineness of this purely propagandistic gimmickry. It would turn out that, in fact, nearly each and every one of the cabinet appointees who had been purported to have allowed their salaries to be slashed by a tenth was also illegally and criminally drawing home double salaries, with either the deliberately calibrated ignorance of their prime benefactor or the willful complicity of President Mahama. This would be publicly revealed by the 11th-hour Mahama-appointed Auditor-General, Mr. Daniel “Yaw” (Yao) Domelevo.
Personally, however, I did not see much that was specially fetching or politically and morally attractive about her being named as a UN Special Envoy to Libya, what with the latter country’s dangerous political and environmental climate, other than Ms. Tetteh’s possibly being conversant with the Arabic language which, perhaps, she intended to polish and significantly upgrade. Now, couple the foregoing with the fact that most Arabic-language speaking countries around the globe did not have any enviable image and reputation of affording women any remarkable modicum of common courtesy or equal respectability as their menfolk, and such avid craving and proposition for such a job almost inescapably became absolutely nothing short of pure lunacy.
But, of course, what could also not be gainsaid about holding such a high-profile portfolio as UN Special Envoy to Libya, was the relatively more decent or generous conditions of service that came with the job. Plus the near-certain possibility that working as a senior-staff operative of the United Nations Organization (UN) guaranteed the lucky or fortunate recipient or subject, the kind of long-term career opportunities that the seasonal stint of even the most powerful and/or influential cabinet appointment could not assure. Plus, the fact that as President Mahama’s right-hand diplomat to the outside world, Ms. Tetteh had also gained professionally distracting and morally debilitating notoriety as a Presidential Paramour who was also widely rumored to be in stiff conjugal competition with “The Missus” or First Lady Lordina Mahama. She may very well have flatly denied that there existed any such extra-professional relationship between the President and the Nation’s Chief Diplomat, except that as of this writing Yours Truly could not vividly or definitively recall the same.
Now, from the afore-referenced brief news report on which this equally brief discussion is based, it well appears that Ms. Tetteh is far more interested in and oriented towards working in an environment that is more temporally stable and offers an avenue for professional and intellectual growth and development, and not the sort of revolving door or treadmill procedural routine that does take the subject of our discussion much farther than her local community and merely offers only the humdrum existence of a thoroughgoing official corruption of one’s moral compass and destiny.
For Ms. Tetteh, therefore, it is perfectly clear that an organization or an institutional establishment with expansive and global reach and depth like the United Nations offers a more salutary and delectable room for growth and impact than merely becoming a Big Kahuna in a baby-sized puddle or swimming pool, as one of this author’s recently deceased undergraduate professors at City College of New York, of the City University of New York, once admonished him, shortly after he had turned down an unofficial offer from one of his professors, an editor of the New York Times and a Harvard alumnus of the late 1950s by the name of Phillip Miller, who was at the time the Evening Chairperson of CCNY’s English Department., to seriously consider writing for the globally renowned “Newspaper of Record.”. For an idealistic Yours Truly, it was uncompromising, a simple matter of principles and morality than sheer fame and fortune.
Anyway, not very long before Professor James DeJong passed on at the wholesome age of 80 years old – and he was afforded a quite decent obituary in The New York Times – the graduate of Williams College and Yale University had suggested to this writer to consider submitting his résumé or curriculum vitae for the possibility of succeeding him as Program Coordinator for African American Studies at the CUNY-Graduate Center, which promised rarefied prestige but was, nevertheless, deemed by YourTruly to be a thankless job, in view of the fact that short of the venerable institutional imprimatur and caché of academic recognition, did not offer much in terms of salary differential and whatever perquisites came with such cranially consuming job to make it reasonably fetching and worthwhile for this tenured community college professor.
You see, Yours Truly had once briefly taught a graduate Seminar Course on West African History at the Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana, and had to spend sleepless nights preparing for lectures and did not love the experience one bit, other than the gilt-edge gloss that such experience added to one’s vita. Perhaps it was also because I was smack in the middle of finishing up my doctoral dissertation in Ghanaian Anglophone Poetry at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, quite a remarkable remove from teaching the totality of West African History over the past half-millennium. No easy pickings, even if one had to teach it as a survey course as I did.
Ultimately, though, what is of utmost significance is not whether one secures a prestigious diplomatic and/or political appointment of any sort, per se, but rather the fact of whether the acceptance or the securing of such appointment or portfolio offers the subject or protagonist the avidly desired opportunity or avenue for growth and development, as well as the sort of impact that can make a heck of a great difference in the lives of humans and society writ large.
In other words, what is needed in Ghana and, one presumes, much of Continental Africa and the so-called Third World at large, is what may be termed as a “National Development Mindset,” and not merely the fact of whether one secures a fiscally cushy job in government or a job that makes one feel exceptionally or conspicuously superior to one’s peers and associates.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
