Goodluck Jonathan
An attempt by former Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan to spark a diplomatic row between Ghana and Nigeria has been foiled by Ghana’s envoy to that country.
It follows claims by Jonathan that President Akufo-Addo made certain disparaging remarks about Nigeria when he gave a keynote address at the Oxford African Conference in London, United Kingdom.
Jonathan claimed, among others that, during the said programme, President Akufo-Addo had made comments to the effect that “Ghana is not Nigeria where cattle can roam about anyhow.” This was during the inauguration of the first bridge built by Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State in Ado Ekiti, Nigeria.
In a statement however, Rashid Bawa, Ghana’s High Commissioner to Nigeria stated that President Akufo-Addo had never made any such comments and that was not even his way of speaking.
Instead, he said Jonathan “took the words of President Akufo-Addo completely out of context.”
He therefore quoted the exact words President Akufo-Addo used during that event in reference to Nigeria saying “for most of you in the audience today, it is probably before your time, but in the late 1970s up to the mid-1980s, as a result of the discovery of considerable petroleum deposits, Nigeria was booming. It was the place to be. We Ghanaians, who were going through very difficult times then, would arrive at Heathrow airport, and be herded into a cage to be subjected to the full third degree search by Immigration, and we would look on as our Nigerian cousins would be waved through, with a ‘welcome sir’ and a ‘welcome madam’.”
“The newspaper headlines in this country were full of Nigerians leaving or forgetting bundles of money in taxis and telephone booths. Nigerians were the preferred tenants for those who had apartments to let. You could stop by any Thomas Cook shop on any High Street in this country and buy or sell Naira, the Nigerian currency, and you could do the same in New York, and I suspect, in many other Western country cities.
“I do not need to spell out today’s reality to anyone in this audience. I cite this just to make the point that ‘the outside world’ is well able to tell that there are separate sovereign nations on the African continent. But, when the news is not good, then Africa is treated as one entity”, President Akufo-Addo was quoted as having said.
That said, Ghana’s High Commissioner asked rhetorically “how, then, can anyone describe these words by President Akufo-Addo as intending to mock Nigeria?”
Instead, he insisted that “President Akufo-Addo, in many of the speeches he has made in Nigeria and elsewhere, since becoming President of Ghana, has described Nigeria as ‘a country I describe as my second home in the world’, and will never use Nigeria to make negative examples, as the former President Goodluck Jonathan sought to portray.”
To that entry, he emphasized, “President Akufo-Addo enjoys a very good relationship with President Muhammadu Buhari, as he has with many other Nigerian leaders. Ghana and Nigeria are like siblings, and it would be most inappropriate, because of politics, for anyone, regardless of his or her status in society, to try to sow seeds of discord amongst the leadership and peoples of our two countries.”
By Charles Takyi-Boadu, Presidential Correspondent