An old photo of Ghana’s First Lady, Mrs Rebecca Akufo-Addo, has popped up on social media with many expressing their admiration for the president’s wife’s beauty.
Although the details of when and where the picture was taken were not stated, the black and white portrait photo shared by Mrs Rebecca Naa Okaikor Akufo-Addo, on her Facebook page, showed her clad in a flowery dress and a pair of hoop earrings which complemented her neatly combed afro hair.
Part of the caption accompanying the photo read:
Dear Ghana,
Here in this picture is a 20-year-old Rebecca Griffiths-Randolph. Unassuming, coy, and bustling in her post-teenage fickleness. Like many young girls around that age, I’m not sure I knew exactly what my life held for me.
I must have had dreams – or fantasies even, and I did care a lot about this country because I knew people who served her. Like my father, Jacob Hackenburg Griffiths-Randolph, the first African Commissioner of Income Tax. He was a Judge and later Speaker of Parliament who woke up every morning putting in his bit, hoping that Ghana got better. Did I possibly see myself leading any of these charges? Most likely not.
Yet the last four years have been humbling. I wake up every morning, adjusting to this charge of the First Lady; partnering a man not only for love but in deep service of our country – the first gentleman. Today, I wonder what the 20-year-old Naa Okaikor understood marriage and of service to the country. Whether she ever imagined that she would become the First Lady. And that the nation’s love would be her love and the nation’s companion would be hers too and moreso, the nation’s worries.