Professor Kwesi Aning, a renowned security consultant specialising in risk assessments and analysis, has strongly condemned what he describes as a deliberate attempt to distort the achievements and contributions of Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

His comments come in response to comparisons made between President Nana Addo Akufo-Addo and Dr. Kwame Nkrumah by Dr. Matthew Opoku, the running mate of the governing New Patriotic Party, during his unveiling ceremony at the Manhyia Palace.

Speaking on the Class Morning Show on Class91.3FM, Professor Aning expressed concern that such manipulations could mislead the public and affect their electoral decisions. 

“When you fabricate and manipulate content that you present as real, then you distort people’s understandings and the choices that they have to make when they get into that booth,” he told host Kwame Dwomoh-Agyemang on Friday, July 19, 2024.

Professor Aning emphasised the importance of principles and values in the quest for public office. He stated, “The principles and the values that must drive what we do in our search for public office, unfortunately, have been thrown to the doors.”

Highlighting the significance of Dr. Nkrumah’s legacy, Professor Aning noted: “We have been following how Ghana’s history, Africa’s Pan-African history, was deliberately distorted. This attempt to deliberately distort his achievements and contributions, not only to Ghana, not only to West Africa but to the continent and to the black race as a whole, is troubling.”

He continued: “Probably there’s no single African, who in terms of scholarly works, is studied globally more than this guy. Even what he left us we can barely maintain.” 

Professor Aning described efforts to manipulate such globally recognised history for political gain as “dangerous.” 

He warned: “When someone who seeks to attain high public office skews this for narrow political purposes, using untruthful, mislabelling, misleading, understated, and manipulated information to distort history, then that is dangerous.”