Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, or the “Snow Leopard” as he has been dubbed, is making his final preparations for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
A skier preparing to take part in the Games at this point in the calendar is not the most sensational news, until it is understood the 31-year-old grew up in Accra, Ghana (where the annual average temperature is around 79 degrees Fahrenheit) and learnt to ski only six years ago on a dry slope.
Nkrumah-Acheampong hopes his remarkable and unconventional rise to prominence — he achieved the strict qualifying criteria set by the world governing body of his sport from his training base at an artificial snow dome in Milton Keynes, England where he was a former employee — can act as inspiration to his countrymen.
Agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation are in Ghana to find out about the sojourn in the country of a Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a US airliner, a Ghanaian minister said Monday.
“The investigation will allow the FBI agents to gather more information on the suspect’s stay in Ghana,” Deputy Information Minister James Agyenim-Boateng told AFP.
He did not say when the FBI team arrived in Ghana and how long the agents plan to stay in the west African country.
It is Ghana’s first known official comment on the allegations by Nigerian authorities that the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, arrived in Lagos on December 24 on a Virgin Nigeria flight from Ghana.
Agyenim-Boateng said Abdulmutallab flew in to Ghana on December 9 on an Ethiopian Airlines flight out of Addis Ababa where he was believed to have connected from Dubai.
On his immigration form in Ghana he stated a Dubai address. Although he gave one hotel name as his address in Accra, he checked into a different one, said the minister refusing to give names of the hotels.
Nigeria has slipped on the corruption perception index to 142nd position from 121st recorded last year, global corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) said in a report released on Tuesday.
“Nigeria scored 2.5 points out of a total of 10 points. Nigeria also took the 142nd position out of the 180 countries surveyed,” secretary general of TI in Nigeria, Osita Nnamani, told reporters, quoting the report.
He said that the Nigerian government has not demonstrated any political will to fight corruption and only paying lip-service to the fight against graft.
The government is yet to react to the TI report.
Every government in power in Nigeria since the nation’s independence in 1960 has always promised to fight against corruption.
Corruption has been identified as a major disincentive to investments in Africa’s most populous nation of 140 million people.
Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao on Sunday pledged to give Africa 10 billion dollars in loans, brushing off criticism of “neo-colonialism” as China boosts its presence on the continent.
“We will help Africa build up its financing capabilities … We will provide 10 billion US dollars for Africa in concessional loans,” Wen told a Forum on China-Africa Cooperation which opened in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Sunday.
His pledge was included among measures he said would be taken over the next three years, including cancelling debts of African countries to increase his country’s role in the continent.
The Asian giant pledged five billion dollars in assistance over three years at the last Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit, held in Beijing in 2006, and has signed agreements to relieve or cancel the debt of 31 African nations.
It will also provide a one-billion-dollar loan for “for small and medium-sized businesses,” Wen said.
The castle stands on the shores of the western coast of Africa, a forbidding compound with dark dungeons where captives lived in sweltering heat with only tiny vents to let in fresh air before they were shipped off to slavery in the New World.
Near the Cape Coast Castle stands a small chapel where slave traders attended services steps away from the misery.
US President Barack Obama’s condemnation of Africa’s “big men” resonated across the continent, creating a chorus of calls Monday for better governance in countries from Nigeria to Zimbabwe.
Obama received an ecstatic welcome during his one-day visit Saturday with huge crowds lining the streets of Ghana’s capital Accra, where he urged Africans to demand stronger government in order to seize control of their own future.
But as the euphoria died down after the visit by the first African-American president, many nations were left soul-searching over their own track records — no where more so than in Kenya, the homeland of Obama’s father.
Obama’s decision to make his first visit south of the Sahara in Ghana again drew attention to last year’s post-election violence in Kenya and the problems of corruption in a country once seen as a development success story.
