Naana Opoku-Agyemang Is Irreparably Damaged Merchandise

She has already been decisively beaten once at the polls, so it is rather absurd for Benjamin Kofi Quarshie, described by the media as Chairman of the Council of Elders of the South African Chapter of Ghana’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), to be obtusely claiming that the re-fielding of a jaded and a politically spent Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang as the 2024 Presidential Running-Mate of an even more effete and jaded Candidate John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama is either “unsettling” or “threatening” to the leadership of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), that is, the same crackerjack team of progressive-minded and visionary leaders who even more seismically trounced the Mahama and the Naana Opoku-Agyemang team of Social-Darwinian Kleptocrats in the 2016 Presidential Election (See “Prof. Opoku-Agyemang's appointment as running mate intimidates NPP — Benjamin Kofi Quashie” Modernghana.com 4/28/24).

We would be a little bit “unsettled,” if the Kingmakers and the Queenmakers of the National Democratic Congress had put Naana Opoku-Agyemang at the very top of the party’s 2024 Presidential Ticket and used a pathologically thievish and grossly administratively incompetent Candidate Mahama as the Presidential Undercard, as the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, had the temerity to lecture the man who “creatively” bestowed him with his long-wished-for regional identity, when the now-Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia was Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s Running-Mate in both the 2012 and 2016 Presidential Elections. Back then Yagbonwura Okogufuo Kwame Gonja counseled his fellow northerners that unless Dr. Bawumia was put at the very top of the NPP’s Presidential Tickets, no northern-descended eligible Ghanaian voter should bother to vote for the New Patriotic Party. Now, hasn’t it been said that “One good turn deserves another”?

Mr. Quarshie has obviously lost touch with the grim but mnemonically indelible reality on the ground, as it were, else this grossly and scandalously misguided party apparatchik would have since long recognized the fact that it was under the watch of Minister of Education Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, between 2012 and 2017 and, in fact, at least two years previously, under the tenures of both tandem Mills-Mahama and the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur ragtag regimes of the National Democratic Congress, that a global survey conducted by the prestigious Paris-based and United Nations-sponsored Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked Ghana’s public education system as butt-naked last among all the 145 countries surveyed around the world. In short, between 2010 and 2017, Ghana’s public education system was ranked among the worst in the world!

So, it could absolutely in no way be either credibly or confidently claimed or asserted before any forum or conference of well-educated and professionally literate and highly competent group of bona fide Ghanaian citizens, that Naana Opoku-Agyemang has significantly contributed to the upgrade and the general development of Ghana’s public school system at all levels of endeavor or enterprise. And on the latter count must also be promptly noted that it was under the tenure of Naana Opoku-Agyemang, who schooled all her now-adult children on scholarship grants abroad, that Ghana’s Minister of Education summarily revoked the age-old Teacher-Trainee Allowances that had been in place and existence since the British colonial era. Now, what the latter observation unarguably means is that Ghanaians were worse off under the previous Mahama regime than they had been under 114 years of British colonial rule. Which, of course, precisely why Candidate Mahama has been desperately and scandalously attempting to con Ghanaian voters to return him to Jubilee House, “So that I can correct my past mistakes.”

And by the way, it was also under Candidate Opoku-Agyemang’s tenure as the Mahama-appointed Education Minister that more than a dozen Teacher Trainees or Students at the University of Cape Coast, where the Elmina native, from the Central Region, had also earlier on been named or appointed as the First Female Vice-Chancellor, sadly and shamefully perished as a result of the outbreak of a highly localized cholera epidemic that struck several geographically scattered parts of the country in 2015, as I vividly recall. Now, what is even more significant to highlight here is the fact that cholera is a very common poor-hygiene-related disease, almost invariably having to do with a scandalously poor upkeep of the environment. So, one must wonder what sort or kind of environmental hygiene protocol Vice-Chancellor Opoku-Agyemang had promoted or put in place under her watch as both Chief Administrator of Ghana’s foremost tertiary academy for the training of educators and educational administrators.

Now, what the foregoing observation clearly and obviously means is that Prof. Naana Opoku-Agyemang could not, after all, be the kind of “impeccable” or professionally unimpeachable politician that Mr. Quarshie would have the rest of us take it for granted that she had been. You see, Dear Reader, personal achievements are one thing and professional and national-development achievements a separate species of animal altogether. If National Democratic Congress’ apparatchiks and propagandists like Mr. Quarshie want Ghanaian citizens and voters to take them seriously, heading into the 2024 Presidential Election, they had better highlight the readily accessible and verifiable contributions made towards the significant upgrade of public education at all levels in the country and even abroad by a “Tokenistic” or a “Tokenizing” Candidate Opoku-Agyemang, as the cynical likes of Mr. Quarshie clearly appears to be doing, which only aggravates matters by insufferably insulting the intelligence of Ghanaian citizens and voters.

For instance, one would like Mr. Quarshie and his Looting Brigade of National Democratic Congress’ apparatchiks and propagandists to line up (or list up), blow-for-blow, the purportedly unique or the yeomanly achievements of Naana Opoku-Agyemang, as compared to the achievements of the current Akufo-Addo-appointed Minister of Education, Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum; and then let all registered and eligible Ghanaian voters decide for themselves which of these two personalities better qualify to be running the affairs of the Sovereign People of Fourth-Republican Ghana. Merely making loud noises and blowing hot air is highly unlikely to sway the minds of citizens and voters who really care about the destiny of the present generation of Ghanaian citizens and posterity.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 28, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]