She has been able to get off the hook by not having her family, both nuclear and traditional or extended, become a major subject of public discourse, even as she swiftly scaled up the academic and professional ladder by holding various titles, including Vice-Chancellor of Ghana’s flagship tertiary academy for teachers and other education-related professionals, the University of Cape Coast. Even as Minister of Education in the previous John Dramani Mahama regime, the familial profile of Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang never became a major focus of public discourse. Which was all well and good. However, now that she has been officially announced as the running-mate of Candidate John Dramani Mahama, the European Airbus SE Payola Expert, her performance on the conjugal and familial fronts ought to become fair game and perfectly legitimate to broach. Among the Akan, of whose culture Naana Opoku-Agyemang is deeply rooted, we say that a wo/man who cannot raise a successful family and manage his/her marriage successfully, cannot also not be expected to govern his/her society and nation successfully. In short, charity ought to begin from one’s home.
This seems to be very relevant because her own adult son, Mr. Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang, has come public to declare an electioneering campaign war on his mother’s main political opponents, namely, the leadership of the ruling New Patriotic Party (See “My Mum’s Track Record Speaks for Her – Naana Opoku-Agyemang’s Son” Ghanaweb.com 7/7/20). The younger Mr. Opoku-Agyemang – and here, the obvious assumption is that there exists and elder Mr. Opoku-Agyemang – also says that he would prefer the 2020 electioneering campaign, especially the presidential aspect of the campaign, to be based “on track records rather than the ‘normal’ spewing out [sic] of insults on other political candidates.” Now, that is also all well and good. Except that Mr. Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang needs to be promptly and upfront told that he simply cannot dictate the terms of how both his mother’s political opponents and those of the main opposition National Democratic Congress decide to take on his mother, that is, Candidate Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang and her boss, to wit, Candidate John Dramani Mahama.
Her abysmal track record at the Ministry of Education, which found Ghana being ranked at the very bottom of some 145 countries’ public high school systems by the globally renowned and respected United Nations-sponsored, Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), is not an enviable or remarkable achievement to debate on the hustings or the campaign trail. She is definitely a remarkable intellectual, absolutely no doubt about that, but as a scholar, Naana Opoku-Agyemang is decidedly pedestrian or as ordinary as the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian lecturers and professors whose John Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented Book and Research Allowances she literally snatched from them while she was Education Minister, in order to create more stealing quarry or avenue for the Mahama cabinet appointees, in particular those appointees who also doubled as Members of Parliament, to take home double salaries.
She may, indeed, have been a competent administrator as a Dean and then Vice-Chancellor of Cape Coast University and, perhaps, even a good classroom teacher or instructor as well. But as a scholar, Naana Opoku-Agyemang has the scantiest sheaf of publications to boast about. To be certain, a casual Google Scholar Search for presence nearly drew blanks, with yours truly registering about three times the scholastic presence of the protagonist of this column. And the fact of the matter is that yours truly, by choice, as a public intellectual and a scholar, in the “Danquaian Tradition,” has almost exclusively confined his writings and publications, for the past 15 years, to such web-media portals as Modern Ghana and Africa News Analysis, with Ghanaweb.com having strategically and consistently boycotted the overwhelming bulk of his writings, obviously for purely partisan reasons. And perhaps for payola-guzzling reasons as well. In short, what the preceding means is that as scholars and/or intellectuals, yours truly is about three times more cited as the source of scholarly research than the Mahama running-mate.
But, of course, Naana Opoku-Agyemang is more of your typical Ghanaian Liberal Arts Doctoral-Degree Holder than the exception, vitae or résumé-heavy and hands-on or practical experiential achievements decidedly insubstantial. One could also bet one’s proverbial bottom-dollar that the depth and quality of the critical and literary output of Candidate Opoku-Agyemang may not be worth a major celebration, after all. In sum, the Mahama running-mate may be a scandalously overrated intellectual and scholar. But that is all to be expected of the leadership of a political party that Mr. John Dumelo, the locally renowned actor, and one of its front-row operatives recently described as a hive of borderline cretins and idiots.
*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
July 7, 2020
E-mail: [email protected]
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