The storm over Professor Kwamena Ahwoi’s ‘Working with Rawlings’ book appears not to abate as a former Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) functionary and Deputy Attorney-General in the Rawlings democratic administration joins the fray against what is now deemed a controversial ploy to twist facts for political profit.
Mr Martin Amidu, in a statement responding to inclement references made to him by Kwamena Ahwoi’s memoire, described the book as an “irredeemable lie”.
That is notwithstanding the fact that the NDC running mate, Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, had hailed the book as an honest piece, “honestly delivered by the author”.
Explaining why he describes the narrative in such terms, Mr Amidu queried how portions of the book, which were cited by the author as rumours, could constitute an “authoritative work”, particularly in areas where he and the late former Vice-President Paa Kwesi Amissah-Arthur had mischievously been tagged “reformists” belonging to Goosie Tanoh’s platoon and rival National Reform Movement.
Worse still, according to Mr Amidu, was the “lie” that he was baited by Kofi Totobi Quakyi to accept a position as running mate in order to dump his intentions to join Goosie’s platoons to fight the parent NDC in 2020.
Dissecting the narrative, he raised issues with Ahwoi’s credibility as Rhodes Scholar, lawyer, professor and author, wondering how he could confuse Chief Justices PENK Archer and Abban or Mayor Nat Nunoo Amarteifio and another government functionary at the Ministry of Local Government, called Ayittey, when all he could do as an academic and scholar was to check reports and other relevant documents before publishing such important narratives.
Naana’s credibility
Exploding, he intimated that he has “always hated laziness in any professional work, not to talk of the work of persons who hold themselves out as scholars, academics or mainstream professionals subjected to disciplinary proceedings by their professions for unethical products.”
Beating his chest, he stated that he served under the same regimes as a ministerial appointee, longer than Kwamena Ahwoi, and “played critical roles in them, lived them, kept some records of my observations and lived experiences.”
He added that he is therefore privileged to “contest some of the author’s or authors’ shoddy and unscholarly reported outcomes.”
Mr Amidu said after reading the book, a major conclusion he drew was that the piece lacked scholarly credibility.
That is evidenced, he argued, in the structuring of the foreword written by Jane and which Amidu claims should normally not have been an integral part of the book because no ethical academic will ever write a foreword to a scholarly book without first reading the book to make an objective assessment of its veracity.
He suspects therefore that the writer of the foreword knew that the invitation to write the foreword was based on the intention by Ahwoi to use her reputation to entice the public to invest financial and human resources in purchasing and reading it.
“In this instance, the writer of the foreword is marketing the book with her credentials of PhD/FGA and has an ethical obligation to the public for integrity and truth in what she says with her credentials in the foreword,” he stated.
Source: Daily Statesman
