Previously in In Heaven As On Earth: Esther Wong
In Heaven As On Earth: Walter Akuffo
Walter Akuffo was born to a middle class family in Accra, a distant relation of the briefly ruling dictator Fred Akuffo. Akuffo’s early life was like many other Ghanians in the first half of the 21st century; improving, but still plagued by the problems Ghana faced in its government and economy. Nevertheless, Akuffo’s star rose from an early age; excellent grades in school, and a job as a civil servant in the Foreign Ministry.
He quickly rose through the ranks due to his aggressive handling of tough situations, such as the Ghananian diplomatic response to the
2029 Burkina Faso coup d’état. In 2032 Akuffo was made Foreign Minister of Ghana.
It was as head of the Foreign Ministry that Walter Akuffo publicly detailed his plans to transform the
Economic Community of West African States or
ECOWAS from an efficient and reliable regional economic union and NATO-esque military force into a true alliance of states, perhaps even a loose confederation. Under a pliable
President Herman Dadjo, who supported the same plan he did, Akuffo laid the groundwork for a new state, tri-lingual, with an elected but rotating head of state similar to the United Arab Emirates. For example, if it was the nation of Liberia’s turn, voters from across the confederation would have only Liberian candidates to choose from that election, but they would have a proportional voice in electing the confederation’s president. Other checks and balances were implemented in the then-hypothetical constitution of the proposed state, to ensure no one country would dominate the state.
Akuffo called this new state the
West African Confederation or
WAC. The rest of his tenure as Foreign Minister was dominated by his preliminary efforts to persuade the rest of the ECOWAS nations to form the WAC.
In the next election in 2036, Akuffo founded the
Unification Party, and ran specifically on his proposed WAC, claiming that it would bring greater prosperity, unity, and peace to the region. He promised that Ghana would not lose its identity, and that it would instead have a new, greater identity as the founders of a new regional power. The Ghanaian voters accepted his argument, and voted him in in a landslide. Interestingly, they also voted in President Herman Dadjo as Prime Minister of Ghana.
Akuffo’s presidency was dominated by reforms of all kinds; legal, economic, anti-corruption, military, and other reforms designed to make Ghana a perfect fit for his dreamed nation. He began the
Accra Accords, a series of agreements with all of the ECOWAS member nations to form the West African Confederation. After 7 years of his presidency, Nigeria, the last hold-out, signed the agreements.
The 2042 election for WAC President was on, with the first rotating presidential election being held in Ghana itself. In truth, it was a mere formality, with the wildly popular Akuffo winning election to a six-year term with 78% of the vote, in a free and fair election. Walter Akuffo’s dream had finally been realized.
As WAC President, Akuffo worked with the presidents of each province in the confederation, and worked on anti-poverty and anti-corruption programs that reduced poverty by 28% by the end of his presidency and corruption by 51%.
Akuffo also confronted several foreign policy challenges during his tenure, the earliest of which was the
Ivorian civil unrest in 2043. Cote D’Ivoire or the Ivory Coast contained prominent dissidents from across the now-confederation, opposing the newfound state. The more militant dissidents formed the terrorist group unimaginatively called the
Liberty and Resistance Forces, or
LRF. The LRF bombed WAC buildings across Liberia, and even went so far as to bomb the American embassy in Accra, as they believed that the US was bank-rolling the West African Confederation (documents declassified in the early 2100s revealed that the LRF’s belief was absolutely correct). The WAC government responded quickly to the bombings, capturing all of the terrorist leaders within a few days, but not quick enough for American President Esther Wong, which resulted in the sardonically named
Esther’s War.
Re-elected in 2048, Akuffo kept up an active foreign policy, sending WAC troops to Venezeula to secure the peace after the
Second Venezuelan Collapse, and fostering trade agreements with Algeria, Libya, and Portugal. Akuffo aggressively promoted democracy across Africa, sending troops to oust the dictatorial Biya family in Cameroon in the
2053 WAC intervention in Cameroon.
Akuffo’s second term also saw groundwork laid for the
West African Space Administration, or
WASA. Akuffo’s efforts would lead to a greater African contribution to the
Second Space Race, especially with his insistence on using
Vedic technology as a tool and not a crutch. The creation of WASA would eventually lead to a WAC colony called
New Accra on Jupiter's moon Callisto.
Term-limited, Akuffo left the WAC presidency at the end of 2054, when it was Mali’s “turn” for the rotating presidency. Akuffo campaigned for
Foreign Minister Leopold Keita, a personal friend of his, but
Malian Interior Minister Ibrahim Traore won instead.
For the remainder of his life, Akuffo would become an unceasing advocate for African unity and peace, and a strong critic of the civil wars seen in African and on other continents. For a few months in the 2060s, he moved to New York City and hosted a foreign affairs program called
Lessons in Foreign Policy, but grew dissatisfied with the low ratings and executive meddling, and moved back to Ghana, where he lived for the rest of his life, dying peacefully in 2085.
Walter Akuffo would be seen by many as a West African George Washington, but by others as an American puppet, his WAC a sham cover for American interests in Africa. His active foreign policy was praised as courageous and aggressive by foreign policy experts, but sometimes derided as expensive and useless, especially in Cameroon, who re-elected a member of the Biya family a mere decade after their ouster. In Ghana, a mild cult of personality formed out of Akuffo’s legacy, with many parents naming their children Walter, and his writings on foreign policy being required reading in Ghanaian schools. The brightest spot of his legacy is that the West African Confederacy endured beyond his death, and the darkest spot is that the LRF also endured past his death, despite the capture of its original leaders. Many saw former WAC president Traore's eulogy for Akuffo fitting.
"Others in West Africa have took empires and ground them to dust under the weight of their incompetence. He took the dust and made it an empire."