Mr Martin Amidu, Special Prosecutor
Special Prosecutor Martin Amidu has chopped down Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, the running mate to the flagbearer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) over the forward she wrote in the controversial book ‘Working with Rawlings.’
Seen as a perfidious attack on the legacy of NDC founder and former President, Jerry John Rawlings, the contentious book written by Professor Kwamena Ahwoi, has raised eyebrows and set tongues wagging in the main opposition party ahead of the 2020 general election.
The latest confidante of the NDC’s founder to critique the book is Martin Amidu.
He argued that no ethical academic will write a forward to a scholarly book without first reading the book to make an objective assessment of its veracity.
The writer of the forward, the former NDC bigwig argued, should know the invitation to write the forward was based on the intention to use her reputation to entice the public to invest financial and human resources in purchasing and reading it.
According to him, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang as the writer of the forward who is now the running mate to former President John Dramani Mahama, is marketing the book with her credentials of PhD/FGA and therefore has ethical obligation to the public for integrity and truth in what she says with her credentials in the forward.
Serious critique
In a write-up responding to Mr. Kwamena Ahwoi’s book, Mr Amidu observed the former NDC colleague presented himself as the primary author but others who are acknowledged and referred to in the book as knowing and living the same observations and experiences the primary author narrates, played the role of co-authors, editors and reviewers of the book.
“The author and/or co-authors claim the primary author is a scholar and a legal luminary. The author and his collaborative authors have thus set themselves to be judged by the high standard obtainable in the professions they profess to belong to.
“Any scholar or professional worth the name must be learned in the philosophy and methods of research including its ethics in his or her chosen field or the discipline he or she holds out himself or herself to be competent in,” he stated.
Mr. Amidu questioned whether Professor Naana Opoku-Agyemang played any significant role as an editor, a reviewer, and an institutional colleague of Prof. Ahwoi in his narratives and writing or authoring of the book such that by the ethics of scholarly and professional writing, she should not ethically have written the foreword to the book.
For instance, in the foreword to the book which is normally not an integral part of the book the reader is told by Naana J. Opoku-Agyemang, PhD/FGA that, “Written in clear, engaging prose, the writer invites the reader to receive the content of the narrative honestly delivered. The vivid, engaging and deeply reflective eye witness account couched in unencumbered prose, brings to the fore events narrated with open honesty and transparency.
“The first-person narrative perspective releases the reader from the potentially uncomfortable position of an intruder to that of a trusted addressee. This is especially so as the text grounds its content in verifiable fact, at times seeking and receiving the approval of non-fictive persons.
“Did she or he conceal those facts which make for an accountable and transparent ethical foreword writing in her foreword to the book,” he quizzed.
Ethical standards
Mr Martin Amidu questioned the ethical basis for professional lawyers and a Justice of the Superior Court to be consultants, reviewers and/or editors of a book in which they were unable to make the right attribution of who the Chief Justice of Ghana was on 7th January 1993.
“To cap it all, the author who holds himself out as a professor, a governance and local government specialist has not yet mastered in his teaching career how to just pick up the Ghana Law Reports reporting 1993 cases to confirm for himself and his consultants, reviewers and/ or editors who was the Chief Justice of Ghana at a particular time in Ghanaian history such as the date of the coming into force of the very important 1992 Fourth Republican Constitution he professes to know and write about with pretentious scholarly erudition,” the Special Prosecutor lamented.
A simple Google search, he argued, could have provided the answers to this scandal of scholarship and judicial conduct exhibited in the ‘Working with Rawlings’ memoir.
“This is the book which the equally portrayed distinguished scholar Naana J. Opoku-Agyemang, PhD/FGA has put her reputation and integrity on the line to the whole world in the foreword when she stated that it is: “Written in clear, engaging prose, the writer invites the reader to receive the content of the narrative honestly delivered. The vivid, engaging and deeply reflective eye witness account couched in unencumbered prose, brings to the fore events narrated with open honesty and transparency.”
The Special Prosecutor hinted his intention to deal with the issues that have been addressed in the book in a series of presentations and pledged to be guided by the ethics of accountable and transparent writing, which requires a professional or academic of any hue who writes very serious discourse for public education to disclose
