Hundreds mourn Baah-Wiredu

Front page, Novermber 7/2008

Story: Charles Benoni Okine

SEVERAL hundreds of mourners and sympathisers from all walks of life yesterday converged on the forecourt of the State House to participate in the solemn state funeral in honour of one of the country’s finest Finance and Economic Planning Ministers, Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu.
As early as 6.00 a.m., the coffin of the late minister, who died in South Africa at the age of 56, was placed under a special tent decorated in black and red, with beautiful flowers placed at the four corners, and opened for public viewing.
Gorgeously dressed in a black suit, a white shirt with a black bow tie to march, Baah-Wiredu, once an agile and active minister, lay motionless in a coffin, with his lower part covered with a rich Kente cloth.
The chief mourner, President J.A. Kufuor, and his wife, Theresa, arrived at the funeral grounds at exactly 9.30 a.m., shortly after the Vice-President, Alhaji Aliu Mahama, and his wife, Ramatu, had arrived to pay their last respects to the first minister to be appointed in the regime of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) in 2001.
Also present to pay their last respects were the Speaker of Parliament, Mr Ebenezer Sekyi Hughes; the Chief Justice, Mrs Justice Georgina Woods, Members of Parliament, members of the Council of State, members of the Diplomatic Corps, Ministers of State, representatives of the various political parties and their flag bearers and a cross-section of the general public.
Earlier, before the President and his entourage arrived, the officiating minister, the Very Reverend Titus Awortwi Pratt, the Superintendent Minister of the Mount Olivet Methodist Church, Dansoman, the late minister’s place of worship, had asked the public to file past the body to pay their last respects.
While they did so, the Mount Olivet Methodist Church Choir and the Ghana Police Band respectively sang and played solemn hymnals from the Methodist Hymn Book to console the many sympathisers.
The coffin, after it had been closed, was draped in the national flag as a sign of respect and recognition of the dedicated duties the late minister had performed when he was alive.
In a tribute to Baah-Wiredu, who was honoured post-humorously by the international community as the African Finance Minister of the Year, President Kufuor described him as one who was very much concerned with the development of all.
“It is a matter of public record that when I was first sworn in as President of the Republic, the first ministerial appointment I made was Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu as Minister of Local Government and Rural Development. I had no hesitation and he did not let me down. Indeed, in the two other portfolios that he later held, he was exemplary,” the President added in the tribute read on his behalf by the Minister of Trade, Industry, Private Sector Development and PSIs, Mr Papa Owusu-Ankomah.
Parliament, for its part, said, “Death has stung the nation yet another time. The sting is monstrously venomous, the time most unpropitious, and the victim most humble, most unassuming, spring-bouncy, variegating-haired son of the soil in whom the nation is well pleased.”
Tributes by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, his former church, Mount Olivet Methodist, Dansoman, the Diplomatic Corps and the Bretons Wood institutions were also read in his honour.
In a sermon chosen from the Gospel of John 14: 1-6, 27, the Right Reverend Abraham Tagoe, the Methodist Bishop of Accra, asked public officers to take a cue from the work examples of the late Finance Minister in order to earn themselves the name and honour when they were also no more.
Rev Tagoe used the occasion to call on Ghanaians to be at peace with one another and carefully consider the various messages presented by the political parties contesting the December general election before casting their votes to elect a new administration to govern the nation.
The body was later conveyed to his home town, Agogo in the Asante-Akyem District, for another burial service and burial on Saturday.