According to an official release, Valerie Anne Sackey, who oversaw the Castle Information Bureau during the Provisional National Defence Council’s (PNDC) government from 1982 to 1992, passed away at the age of 88.
She also worked in President Jerry John Rawlings’ office from 1992 to 2001 in the Public Affairs Secretariat.
Sackey was born in 1935 in Accrington, United Kingdom, to Nancy Lindoe, an art teacher at Accrington College of Art, and Valentine Lindoe, the college’s principal. According to a Rawlings Foundation announcement, she passed away on December 31, 2023.
“The J J Rawlings Foundation regrets to announce the death of Mrs Valerie Anne Sackey, Director of the Castle Information Bureau during the administration of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) from 1982 to 1992 and of the Public Affairs Secretariat at the office of President Rawlings from 1992 to 2001. She passed away on 31st December 2023,” the statement said.
Valentine Lindoe, the principal of the Accrington College of Art, and Nancy Lindoe, an arts teacher at the college, were the parents of Mrs. Sackey (née Valerie Anne Lindoe), who was born in Accrington, United Kingdom, in 1935. Three days after Ghana gained its independence in March 1957, she arrived there and wed Mr. Horace Walter Kofi Sackey, whom she had met and married while studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
She first worked as a geography teacher at the Opoku Ware Secondary School in Ghana before joining the Department of Game and Wildlife and being sent to the Kumasi zoo.
In 1969, under Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia’s Progress Party government, she relocated to Accra and resumed her employment with the Department of Game and Wildlife when her husband was named a Minister of State.
After the Progress Party regime was overthrown in 1972 and Valerie Sackey returned to Kumasi, she worked as a teacher at St. Louis Secondary School before joining the Department of Game and Wildlife’s Kumasi unit.
She wrote under the pen name Yaa Asantewaa during this time for the Pioneer newspaper, covering a variety of current topics. She attracted a large readership in a culture that tends to use euphemisms to skirt over painful aspects of our sociopolitical existence because of her straightforward and sensible approach to matters.