Kwaku Sakyi-Addo

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Kwaku Sakyi Addo is a respected journalist from Ghana. He has won Ghana's Journalist of the Year Award twice, the only media practitioner in the country to attain the feat, and is the reporter of choice for the world's most prestigious news outlets on current affairs in Ghana^{[citation needed]}. As the country correspondent for both Reuters and the BBC, his reports about Ghana are circulated worldwide, and he is noted for being a non-partisan journalist who has worked in radio, television, and print.

His writing is notable in that it usually consists of simple or colloquial prose. Remarking on a book chronicling the journalism career of Elizabeth Ohene, presently a Minister of State in Ghana's ruling Government, he said it "transport[s] you almost bodily and leave you smack in mid-May 1979 to the deep end of the putrid 70s."^[1]

Some contend that he is a better interviewer than writer. Having interviewed almost every prominent international dignitary to visit Ghana from the mid-nineties to the close of the decade^{[citation needed]}, Kwaku has produced some revealing moments in his career. In a chat with esteemed public intellectual, Ali Mazrui, the Kenyan admitted that he enjoyed the life of the mind because he was keenly aware there were few practical virtues he possessed. The Kenyan thinker responded to Kwaku's searching inquiries, what else will I do? Drive a bus? I can't even drive my own car.^{[citation needed]} In another interview with Ghana's former Finance Minister and current Director of the African Studies Program at Harvard University, Dr. Kwesi Botchwey, a noted Socialist, he inquired why the renowned economist had not taken up a post at one of the foreign institutes at Pyongyang instead of accepting a job in Boston, a city which embodies the capitalist qualitities of the U.S.A. Dr. Botchwey replied, "no, I wouldn't like that, but that said, I am not too sure what [the North Koreans] 'are doing over there' is really communism, either."^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Education

Kwaku received his secondary education at Achimota School. He proceeded to the University of Ghana's School of Communications. He was sponsored by the Thompson Foundation to study at the University of Wales in Cardiff. He has also taken courses at the International Institute of Journalism in Berlin and was a one-time Chevening Scholar. He is currently a Permanent Fellow of the World Press Institute at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, US.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Career

Kwaku presents Ghana's longest-running radio series^{[citation needed]}, The Front Page, widely acknowledged as the country's most sophisticated news/current affairs radio program. His work has been published in The Economist, The Washington Post and Newsweek. International figures who have been been interviewed by him include: Kofi Annan, past Secretary-General Boutros Ghali, Jimmy Carter, one-time Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir, former British Cabinet Minister Lord Carrington, Bono, and his American soulmate Larry King of Larry King Live.^{[citation needed]}

He is a Fellow of the African Leadership Initiative, a forum for continental leaders to define the next threshold for visionary leadership in Africa affiliated with the Aspen Institute.^{[citation needed]}