Is this Really Important, Ghanaweb?

I have personally sampled some of their media fare and can readily vouch that Ghanaweb.com – to be clearly distinguished from the newly created Ghanaweb.Live – routinely features the works of some of the most professionally adept media practitioners in the country and around the world. Unfortunately, however, it also well appears to this professionally trained media practitioner – print journalist, to be more specific – that there very well may be professionally trained standup comedians running the show at the country’s oldest and, until very recently, foremost media portal. Now, we make the foregoing observation with reference to a news story captioned “Watch How Akufo-Addo ‘Snubbed’ Ken Agyapong, Alan, Others at Wofa KK’s Funeral” that was recently published by this major media portal (Ghanaweb.com 4/28/24).

The story is about Mr. Kwabena Kwakye, the locally renowned veteran broadcast journalist who recently transitioned into the ages, as former US President Barack H. Obama is wont to say, while busy at work at the Accra-based Kencity Studious, owned by Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, the at once renowned and nationally infamous stalwart of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and recently retired Member of Parliament for Assin-Central Constituency, in the Central Region. You see, one would have thought that the presence of the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo at Wofa KK’s funeral, reportedly held on the forecourt of The State House, which also houses Ghana’s Parliament or National Assembly, would have been wisely and deftly used to highlight some of the most pressing problems presently plaguing the country, such as Dumsor, that is, the perennially erratic power supply, which had, hitherto, almost become a veritable relic of the past and the previous John “Brazil Embraer-Scamming” Dramani-led government of the National Democratic Congress.

Instead, the comedic editors and publishers of Ghanaweb chose to spotlight a prime grist for gossip, a trivial subject having to do with the purported fact of whether, indeed, the twice-elected Nana Akufo-Addo had snubbed or conspicuously overlooked the presence of former party stalwart and Akufo-Addo-appointed Trade and Industry Minister, namely, Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen, the man who recently severed his personal relationship with and official affiliation with the institutional establishment of the ruling New Patriotic Party, which he also claim to be a cofounder, merely because Alan Cash, as Mr. Kyerematen is also popularly known, could not abide being decisively defeated by Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia in the party’s 2024 Presidential-Election Primary. Now, we are talking about a stiff-necked sore loser who believes that he ought to have been chosen over the twice-elected for President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor from as back as the 1996 Presidential Election, but for the admonishment of some revered party elders, an admonishment which, in retrospect, Alan Cash now firmly believes had royally served him in abjectly bad stead.

And just recently, the morbidly self-infatuated Alan Cash was also widely reported to have said that but for his grossly ill-advised magnanimity, there would have been absolutely no way by which Nana Akufo-Addo could have been elected in 2007 as the 2008 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party and that, somehow, his relative youthfulness had caused him to, rather unwisely, in retrospect, to consent to deferring to a man who clearly and obviously lacked Mr. Kyerematen’s caliber of talent and genius. Even more damning and politically suicidal was Candidate Kyerematen’s claim that he had done Nana Akufo-Addo the clearly undeserved favor of serving as the Trade and Industry Minister in the government of the former Agyekum-Kufuor-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, even while also being fully aware of the fact that the government of the twice-elected President Akufo-Addo was the very worst of its kind in Ghana’s Fourth Republic; and that, at best, the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party government could be described as a “NATO” regime, meaning, a government driven and exclusively fueled by “No Action” but “Talk Only.”

You see, this is the kind of poisonous political character that former US President Donald John Trump clearly and obviously had in mind, when the latter recently petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to be afforded prosecutorial immunity, so that he could summarily eliminate from our national political scene. It is nothing short of downright blasphemous for the editors and the publishers of Ghanaweb not to have readily recognized the fact that unwisely attempting to shake hands with Nana Akufo-Addo’s most inveterate and implacable nemesis could very well have become an irredeemable kiss of death for both the fortunes of the New Patriotic Party and the widely presumed Next President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

But, of course, this is all the more to be expected, in view of the fact of Ghanaweb’s having “distinguished” itself as the politically strategic equivalent of FOX News and US Republican Party. At least, even as the editors and publishers of Ghanaweb tell us, a genuinely bereaved Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong was decent enough to have gotten out of his seat to warmly welcome Nana Akufo-Addo, who sat under an adjacent canopy on the forecourt of The State House, to Mr. Kwabena Kwakye’s funeral. For the irrecoverably defeated Mr. Boakye Agyarko, the condignly fired former Energy Minister and inveterate detractor of Vice-President Bawumia, the least said about this impudent political gigolo, the better.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

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