Subj: Epistle to Kwaku Danso and Answers to his Questions
Date: 18/12/97
To: KDanso@compuserve.com

CC: KBoateng@DFI.WA.GOV, Acquah@ghana.com; ADanso@aol.com; addyy@rpi.edu;

CC: ade@equinoxc.demon.co.uk; Okyeame@mit.edu;

CC: africa_think_tank@databack.com; quaynor@ncs.com.gh;

C



Epistle to Kwaku Danso



"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me."



- Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727))

Your Excellency Mr. Rt. Hon. Kwaku Danso,

I have followed closely your unremitting attack on my goodself, including your poor attempts at ageism and pathetic parody; I hadn't responded earlier as I had been horribly trammelled. Your sleuth-hound sort of perseverance in prosecuting this cause, however unworthy, is commendable; you have thrown your whole force of mind, and it appears, your vast powers of flighty imagination and invective upon this task.

Indeed, your apparent stupefaction by my original intervention in your fracas with Prof Dodoo seems profound; but surely, you couldn't have been so nonplussed as to jump to the rather laughable conclusion that I am old enough to be your grandfather. I may be much older than you, but I am no geriatric . If, on the other hand, you obdurately stick to your original conclusion you must accept my avuncular counsel in good faith. It seems obvious, nevertheless, that you no longer seem the rampaging lion who attacked Prof Dodoo initially, more a placid pussy cat still wanting to be President of Ghana.

Overall, your po-faced clobberings of my goodself are directed to two purposes: The one to show that in your dispute with Prof Dodoo I have unfairly come down heavily on you like a ton of bricks, the other to make fun of what you consider to be my senior citizenship.

Let us take the last first.

I thought with the ceaseless puffed up parading of your Lilliputian knowledge and arguments and the endless display of your "virtuoso gifts of scholarship", you would have confined your strictures to the content of my posting. Rather, you repeatedly bemoaned what "the old man" had said; complained about what "the old man of Nkrumah's time" had done, and other such trivia.

Yes, I am called  Numo; but that is traditional Ga title used by Wulomei such as the Nai Wulomo and Sakumo Wulomo; and of course, in terms of longevity I possess more experience than yourself, although I am perhaps too unassuming to aspire to the high presidential office you are aiming for. Perhaps, that is just as well as, at least to the NPP elite and those who think like them, it appears open only to members of their alleged tribal majority. You associate yourself with such a blatantly tribalistic party, interested not only in attaining power, but also in etching deeply into the popular psyche, patently false notions and/or ideologies about Ghana. 

I tell you what I think, since I am asked: I do not suggest that you are one, but I reckon irrational people would not be averse to taking a similar line of reasoning as you do in regard to Ghana's population. To do obeisance to well-worn Ghanaian myths, you have resorted to useless jargon and reached cock and bull conclusions about Ghana's population.

But first, let us now look to the other side of the question. What do people like Danso want to achieve with all this massaging, "engineering" and conjuring of "facts" about Ghana? It is 18 long years since Flt. Lt. Rawlings, as was, decided to take centre stage in our national politics. Since then well-meaning Ghanaians have rightly deplored the excesses of the various regimes headed by Rawlings. Just when we thought there was light at the end of the tunnel, people like our brilliant Danso seem to be emerging as a phalanx of alternative leadership.

Mr Danso, meticulous nit-picking of your stated views are, in my opinion, necessary to straighten out evidence of warped perceptions. In your case, many such muddled perceptions has been shown in the blinding searchlight of scrutiny. You stated that you were using "Scientific Wild Ass Guess" (SWAT) to establish the ratios of ethnic make up reflected in Ghana's population statistics. You expected us to believe you even where your views collapsed into incoherence?

But just what is "Scientific Wild Ass Guess" which Danso describes as "usually made when one has years of experience in something"? Scientific Wild Ass Guess, as explained by Danso is nothing but a decidedly unscientific and patently dubious way of avoiding empirical certainty, allegedly applied in American Engineering.

Of course Danso is entirely at liberty to apply such a questionable approach to the population statistics of Ghana; a man has a right to mislead himself afterall, but he must be particularly obtuse to attempt to mislead the cerebral on the basis of some concocted theory. The rest of us can clearly see the infinite subjectivity, hence unacceptability, of any conclusion reached on that basis. Certainly Danso did not expect the mass grey matter of netters to swallow such dubiously unscientific methodology hook, line and sinker. This would have been a display of timidity and insouciance in equal measure on the part of netters.

Mr Danso, some attempt at lateral thinking on your part might have been more acceptable. Such thought would chiefly have reminded you that any extrapolations from the 1960s baseline of Ghanaian population statistics would have to contend with factors like better health facilities and greater life expectancies in urban areas. But obviously you are no lateral thinker, and your general views about education, scholarship and intelligence seems to be that if an individual did not study engineering or got himself into business ventures, then that individual must be lacking in intellectual thought.

Your disdain for others on the Net makes me wonder what you think of the ordinary people of Ghana. Many of them would have, given the appropriate opportunity and background, acquitted themselves more honourably at academic pursuits. I have stated this before; and I reiterate that in the general scheme of things, engineers, architects and even medical doctors are not considered intellectuals, the label being generally reserved for writers, philosophers and thinkers (emphasis mine) in the liberal arts.  You  postulate a modern day romanticised and apparently psychedelic view of engineers, technicians, artisans, etc. etc. as modernity's intellectual vanguard is bound to be unacceptable to many.    

All this fussing about who is supporting the NDC and the like does not cut any ice with me; I am surely no NDC supporter. The present political formations in the country are not to my liking. Nevertheless I criticise them constructively. For people like yourself, obsession with the pathology of Ghanaian politics appears more interesting than the more useful art of constructive criticism.

Some are more, and others less intelligent. Yet we all have right to this world; our gifts are different. Be you a carpenter, sanitary inspector or longshoreman, nobody has a right to tell you that you are of less value than himself. This Kwaku Danso, aspiring president of the Republic of Ghana, is always crowing about how clever he is and how much material possessions he has accumulated.

He assumes that he is head and shoulders above us all, intellectually; and therefore, we ought to supinely accept any idea he coughs up, however distorted. Men of great intellect, such as Sir Isaac Newton (supra), were distinguished by their modesty. Yes the man whose whole legendary brilliance cracked open the world of science and physics, was essentially a modest and unassuming scholar; not so our great luminary, The Honourable Kwaku Danso who simply can't stop telling the world what a genius he is. 



A Set of Impertinent Questions



Mr Kwaku Danso, you have latterly upped your offensive against me, describing me, amongst other things, as "frustrated" and stuck in the white man's world. I treat your list of questions with the ridicule they deserve. Have you bid farewell to your cherished profession of engineering and donned the mantle of an advocate? In your fevered imagination you think you can put any question to anybody in the style of an examination-in-chief when your own confused ramblings can hardly bear up to sustained cross-examination as we have all witnessed recently.

Let us take a miscellany of the points you raised.

Question 1: This question needn't have been asked as the answer is so obvious. Your statement about an ethnic majority in Ghana's population is an obvious lie; in fact, this is old hat on Okyeame. It is the simple lie I referred to; the truth is far more complex, a fact obviously not acknowledged by your elementary school teachers on whose wisdom you seem to be relying. Ghana's population has never had a simple ethnic majority. Challenging this simple truth is like joining the Flat Earth Society to question the proven geometrical shape of the globe. Like Sisyphus, you have been carrying this burdensome little load of yours frustratingly up the hill of truth for too long without triumphing.


The questions on which you have pinned your integrity and my alleged lack of the same are amateurish in the extreme. Many of them would be ruled out as irrelevant by any bewigged judge; further and better particulars would be required for the remainder. For all this, it is a bit strange that you take offence at being described as a presidential aspirant with minimal prospects. What was your GDRP all about? If you find it ridiculous that is your problem; Kwaku Danso's burden.

Question 2: This question is pointless. As an old Bukom boy, I am utterly fearless and would take on any intellectual fight except for fights with obvious intellectual lightweights; with your acrobatic leaps of logic, you are in danger of getting yourself into that category. I guess you are a man of immense musculature, the way you do acrobatics and talk endlessly about physical fights. A fight with a lightweight parodies intellectual effort.

Question 3: You ask why in all your scrapes with Francis Dodoo, Nii-Okai Addy, Ade Sawyerr, CK Ladzekpo, etc., etc. I pick on only you. The answer is self-evident. You are the common denominator in all those unsavoury exchanges. While questioning my wisdom, sagacity, etc. in one breath, you ask me to do a Solomonic carve-up in another, and find against both you and your alleged detractors. Is the warped logic not obvious to you? Or is it a case of the left hemisphere of the brainbox not knowing what the right is doing?

Okyeame is a public forum, and it curious that in your Question 4 you ask me to define "many". Whether you are rational or not is for all to judge (Question 5). I guess only a stand up comedian would describe you as a supreme logician on the evidence we have seen so far.

On Question 6, I refer you once again to your own curious statements. Where you not the same individual who in attacking Prof Dodoo questioned the accreditation of some American universities? Does your right hand never know what the left is doing as you contradict yourself so much? Is this how you intend to govern Ghana?

Question 7 is plain daft. Whichever generation is responsible for laying Ghana low, the fact remains that tribalism, nepotism, etc. and the other isms which you seem to avidly advocate have been at the core of our failings as a nation.

On Question 8, I refer you to my answer to Question 1 above. My original statement in no way implied that you hail from the same area as Otuo Acheampong. A German and a white South African can be racist in their own separate ways; so can you and Otuo in the matter of tribalism. "Isms" have nothing to do with where one comes from; just as you, a Ghanaian,  and the majority of Americans preach capitalism.

How can you draw the inference that simply because both you and Otuo may be tribalists, it follows that you hail from the same area of Ghana. There are specific rules for drawing logical inferences from primary facts.
Put your thinking cap on, Kwaku!

Since you question my scholarly pedigree, I humbly inform you that I acquitted myself with distinction at O-levels (nine subjects) and have successfully studied for a doctorate. If you care to know, I have also faced bullets in a war front (apologies to netters).

I am not one of the "historically brave" you proudly referred to, but my ancestor, Chief Kwatei Kojo also fought with distinction at the great Battle of Katamanso in 1826 when the Ga army inflicted a resounding and crushing defeat on the Asante army ; check the textbooks on this.
You know who pissed in their trousers at that battle? I should like to see the look on the face of the likes of you with bullets flying around.

You are a tribalist as evidenced by your irrational obsession with massaging statistics and "engineering" a majority ethnic group in Ghana. All in all, your questions are pathetic and prove nothing, except perhaps that you lack the wit to put together a more formidable set of questions. But for your pomposity, I could teach you a thing or two about proper line of questioning, including ambush, leading questions, probing for contradiction and other techniques of cross-examination and proper questioning. But you are what we call in Ghana "TOO KNOWN"; therefore I leave you to wallow in your misery; and by exposing your own ignorance on Okyeame, totally discredit your claim to extraordinary intelligence.

The way you carry on is an insult to intelligent people. In a separate posting you proffered your personal knowledge of the editor of The Chronicle as though that vouches for the opinion of columnists in that paper. Is this the depth of your intelligence? For all your bragging you are just a bantam in this field. Your lightweight questions are otiose, frivolous and vexatious.

Yet you've pinned so much of your much-vaunted intelligence on it. In the meantime, like the Proverbial Vulture, you had prematurely been parading the dunghill, proclaiming that you had won the fight.


I pose my own pertinent question to you at the foot of this posting. Considering your performance so far, I will help you answer it. The point of the question is to impugn your integrity and credibility; undermine your soundness of judgement and generally make you out for what you actually are: an inadequate attention-seeker and potential megalomaniac who keeps dodgy characters as confederates. Now, go to the foot of this posting and in answering the question, tell the truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth. When you have done that, we will have reached that stage of a trial where the prosecutor tells defence counsel: "Your witness". We will then find out the shady secrets of your surreptitious California hide-out.


You have also got this bee in your bonnet about being questioned by people you have never known. Is that the basis on which you participate on Okyeame? You should expect a solid response once you begin to push a dodgy stance on a public forum; your opponents do not have to be your acquaintances or your fellow travellers on the GDRP bandwagon. A point is a point; anybody can have a go at it, be they octogenarians or babes.

You outrageously suggested that I am an NDC functionary or government agent. I guess the NDC bigwigs who have never heard of me would be laughing!  As would Rawlings, who only a couple of years ago got a stinging personal letter from me. Such people, seeing all the facts, would laugh at your obvious lack of wisdom and vain pretensions at intellectualism.

As one of the walking wounded from active military service I thoroughly deserve any gratuity that enables me to travel the globe. Come again, Kwaku Danso, if you are man enough. To rely on a famous American phrase, your postings are a "salad of nonsense". It is small wonder that you chronically suffer an indigestion of logic and perception on such deficient mental pabulum.

You can say "Bah, Humbug" to my Merry Christmas, for all I care.
By all means keep nurturing your ambitions in Ghana. One day we may see your name in lights (to borrow Chuck Berry's phrase) above the Castle gates; and after 18 odd years of shrinkage we might expect some sound economic regeneration under your capable leadership.

To add to your own newly-minted views, Ghana would then be led by an elite of engineers who will then proceed to build a new polity and economy in a manner very much akin to what happens in the engineering of bridges: the people do not matter except perhaps as paid labourers; just steel, cables, nuts and bolts. If any problems develop during the engineering process, do a quick troubleshoot using an algebraic equation based on the "Scientific Wild Ass Guess" (SWAT) theory; and pronto, it is all sorted!

I have no doubt that in the end you will discover that rational analysis and action programming and monitoring rather than your brand of contumely and abuse are required for good governance.  But as I have neither didactic purpose nor allegorical intent, I shall refrain from further interfering with your grand plans for the nation.

You are warned, netters:
coming soon to a rally near you will be Kwaku Danso and his Engineers & Majority Peoples Party  with a side-show of sundry acrobats, spivs, con-merchants, snake-oil salesmen, crafty crooks, jewel-eyed tarts, word-jugglers, confused logicians, Humpty-Dumpty word users who make words mean only what they intend, and other slimy inhabitants of the nether world; all with a massive bout of egomania, megalomania and a burning desire to lead Ghana. 

Engineers of the World Unite!
Follow Kwaku Danso the Great Leader; you are the illuminati of the modern world.

Long Live Ghana

Your Excellency, I remain,
Your humble and obedient servant. And, Sir, Merry Christmas.


NUMO NOTSE AMARTEY

PS: You are always coy as an oyster when asked about that buddy of yours who conned the Ghanaian nation about having a PhD.
Why don't you open that intelligent brainbox of yours now, part your braggadocio lips and tell us about that chap. He had the cheek to tell all Ghanaians that he was conning nobody as he always appended ABD (All But Dissertation) to his invented academic title.
Was that by a process of Scientific Wild Ass Guess? You certainly do keep some dodgy company,  don't you?
I expect a honest reply to this with your usual promptitude.