Nana Agyemang-Badu Deserves No Apologies from John Boadu

Everybody knows that Osagyefo Oseadieyo Agyemang-Badu, the Paramount Chief of the Dormaa Trdatitional Area, has deep sympathies towards the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), so we need not pretend as if he has been conducting himself in the respectable manner of a nonpartisan chieftain. We also know that the patently bogus activist group calling itself the Inter-Party Resistance Against the Compilation of the New Voters’ Register (IPRANR) is a veritable front of the National Democratic Congress. So, if he were the learned invested traditional ruler that the so-called Dynamic Youth Movement of Dormaa (DYMOD) and the Young Professionals Group of Dormaa (YPGD) are making him up to be, Nana Agyemang-Badu, as a lawyer of allegedly great repute and remarkable standing in practice, ought not to have called for the compilation of the new National Biometric Voters’ Register (NBVR) to be halted in the spurious name of national peace and stability, knowing full well that the decision by the administrators of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to compiling the new National Biometric Voters’ Register was staunchly backed by a legitimate Act of Parliament (See “Apologize to Dormaahene – Groups to John Boadu” ClassFM.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/18/20).

As a lawyer with some 20 years of professional experience, Nana Agyemang-Badu was expected to fully appreciate parliamentary protocol and the rule of law and order. In calling for the compilation of the new National Biometric Voters’ Register to be halted, the Dormaahene was showing inexcusable disrespect for the legitimately elected representatives of the Ghanaian people, including parliamentary representatives from his own traditional jurisdiction and the very establishment of our National Assembly at large. The Dormaahene was thus in grievous breach of the civilized laws of the land, more so, when he was also fully cognizant of the fact that the reason for the compilation of a new National Biometric Voters’ Register was because the current one was heavily contaminated, that is, jampacked with the names and particulars of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of foreign nationals, an egregiously criminal act which stood a greater chance of causing civil strife and the destabilization of our beloved country, unless this fundamental act of social injustice and human depravity was promptly halted or rectified.

In short, it is inexcusably preposterous for the Dormaahene to suggest or even propose that running Ghana’s electoral democracy on the strength of a heavily flawed National Voters’ Register was a rational means of keeping peace and stability in the country. This primitive mode of reasoning clearly lacks wisdom and common sense. So, it is rather strange to me that the youths of Dormaa Ahenkro would rally their support behind such a scandalous reasoning by one of the major traditional rulers in the country. Indeed, it is rather Osagyefo Oseadieyo Agyemang-Badu who owes both Mr. Boadu, the General-Secretary of the ruling New Patriotic Party, and the entire country an unqualified apology for woefully failing to reason like a chief, let alone a Paramount Chief.

You see, I have always been made to revere the Dormaahene, I mean the late Oxbridge-educated Nana Agyemang-Badu, who was once a freshly minted teacher-training college alumnus and a second-grade teacher when my own maternal grandfather, The Rev. TH Sintim (1896-1982), was Headteacher of the Dormaa Ahenkro Presbyterian Primary School sometime in the 1930s or the 1940s: somebody could check from the record books of the Dormaa Ahenkro Presbyterian Church of School. We have seen and worked with far more enlightened Dormaa chiefs than the present pretender. And on the latter count, truth be said, I am afraid the current Nana Agyemang-Badu does not meet the requisite standard of the enviable status of leadership set by his predecessors.

I am also a descendant of the Aduana Clan, the Royal Aduana Clan of Akyem-Nkronso, Head of the Baamu Division of Akyem-Abuakwa and Traditional Custodians of Okyeman Stool Lands. But I can vouch without any fear of contradiction that the present Nana Agyemang-Badu, who may very well be my own peer or contemporary, cannot be our Piese or First Among Equals. He is a pale shadow of his much-revered predecessors and ancestors.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

July 2, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]