The urgent questions before the Nigerian Community in Ghana are:
1. At what point does an association cease to be an association and become the private estate of one man?
2. At what point does one of its executive officers, in this case its PRO, elected or appointed to perform a specific function, begin to behave as though the organization belongs to him?
3. And at what point do the remaining executives surrender so much of their authority that they become little more than spectators in an organization they are supposedly governing?
These are not idle questions for the leadership of the All Nigerian Community (ANC) in Ghana. They are questions that the executives owe the Nigerian community a serious answer.
For there is an increasingly disturbing perception that the ANC has become the personal fiefdom of its Public Relations Officer, Prince Wisdom. If that perception is false, the executives should have no difficulty disproving it.
If it is true, then the ANC has a governance crisis that can no longer be concealed behind official titles, photographs, meetings, and grandiose claims to represent Nigerians in Ghana.
The first question is elementary: Since when did a Public Relations Officer become more powerful than the President of an association?
A PRO is, by definition, a communications officer. His responsibility is to communicate the organization’s decisions and positions. He is not the organization’s supreme commander.
He does not outrank the President. He does not supersede the Secretary-General. He certainly does not possess some mysterious constitutional authority to ignore directives from the very leadership to which he is subordinate.
Yet this appears to be precisely the extraordinary situation that members are being asked to accept.
Prince Wisdom routinely disregarded directives from the President and from the other ANC executives.
If a PRO can openly defy the President and nothing happens, then who is actually running the organization?
More disturbing still is the PRO’s penchant for removing members from ANC WhatsApp platforms at will.
On what authority? Under what disciplinary procedure?
Where is the hearing? Where is the right of reply? Where is the constitutional provision that transforms a communications officer into judge, jury, and executioner?
An association representing Nigerians in a foreign country cannot operate according to the moods, friendships, prejudices, or personal preferences of one individual.
And then there is the elephant in the room: money.
There are widespread questions about the PRO’s used-clothes business being used to finance the association’s activities, giving him enormous control over the association.
Another question: Is Mr. Wisdom’s used-clothes trading business in Ghana legitimately registered in accordance with the laws of Ghana?
These questions deserve transparency, not intimidation or silence.
Nigerians have every right to demand answers.
Indeed, one cannot escape the uncomfortable suspicion that the extraordinary power wielded by the PRO survives because other executives have become reluctant to challenge him for their personal or pecuniary interests.
This represents institutional decay.
But the matter becomes even more serious when politics and separatist agitation enter the picture.
The ANC is supposed to represent Nigerians in Ghana, not provide a platform for sectional political agitation.
Yet, Prince Wisdom blatantly offered protection and accommodation to persons associated with IPOB who openly conduct their agitation on ANC platforms.
If the association’s own rules prohibit such activities, why are those rules apparently being applied selectively?
Nobody should be above the rules, not the PRO, not the President, not the Secretary-General, and certainly not any political faction.
The irony is almost painful. An association established in the name of Nigerian unity could find itself weakened by precisely the kind of sectionalism and impunity that Nigerian community organizations ought to resist.
The executives therefore need to decide what the ANC actually is. Is it a constitutional organization serving Nigerians, or is it an arrangement in which one powerful officer can do as he pleases while everybody else looks away?
They must wake up.
They must restore constitutional government, establish transparent financial practices, enforce their rules impartially, and make it unmistakably clear that the ANC belongs to its members—not to Prince Wisdom, not to the President, not to the Secretary-General, and not to any cabal benefiting from its activities.
Otherwise, the ANC’s claim to represent all Nigerians in Ghana will remain nothing more than a grand title attached to an organization whose credibility is being steadily eroded from within.
And when an organization loses its credibility, no amount of ceremonial speeches, handshakes and photographs with dignitaries can save it.
The rot must be confronted. The rules must prevail. And the executives must remember whom they were appointed to serve.
©️Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)
