Kufuor Never Learned Anything Meaningful from His Political Incarceration

John Agyekum-Kufuor

“ 'It was so humiliating' Kufuor recounts prison experience” (Ghanaweb.com 7/5/20). That was the heading of a news article that briefly recounted the 15-month incarceration of some leading members of the Progress Party (PP) government of the democratically elected Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia that was overthrown by the IK Acheampong junta of the National Redemption Council (NRC). What Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor meant by his “humiliating” experience was the fact that most of the political prisoners at the Ussher Fort Prisons or prison cells in James Town, Accra, including a 34-year-old Mr. Kufuor, who had been Deputy Foreign Minister in the Busia government, had no privacy when it came to taking their baths and responding to Nature's Call.

Well, that may very well have been humiliating enough. But, of course, what really matters here is the fact of whether our prisoner protagonist learned anything meaningful from this clearly harrowing experience. His later reaction and attitude towards the equally criminal overthrow of the Hilla “Babini” Limann-led democratically elected government of the People's National Party (PNP), by then-Flight-Lieutenant (Rd) Jerry John Rawlings and his Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), leads us to believe that Mr. Kufuor learned absolutely nothing from this otherwise quite traumatic experience. That Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor was one of the very first persons to be named to a cabinet portfolio constituted by this serial career coup-plotter, clearly indicates that the former Busia-appointed Deputy Foreign Minister, short of crude and crass political opportunism, has absolutely no practically respectable and principled sense of democratic ethics.

This “turncoat” behavior was in perfect contradiction to the reaction of Mr. Victor Owusu, late, the main political opponent of the just-ousted Dr. Hilla Limann. Mr. Owusu was the leader of the Popular-Front Party (PFP). Deviously invited by the 33-year-old Chairman Jeremiah (Jerry) John Rawlings to join with him to form a Government of National Unity (GNU), the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the Busia-led PP government was widely reported to have bluntly asked Chairman Rawlings to either promptly hand back the reins of governance to the democratically elected President Limann or call for fresh elections, if Chairman Rawlings envisaged the man that he had just recently overthrown to be grossly incompetent for the job. Of course, the latter righteous appeal went unheeded. Nobody expected an increasingly rowdy and self-infatuated megalomaniac, in retrospect, to heed the visionary and prophetic call of Mr. Owusu.

On the other hand, a patently knavish Mr. Kufuor, the former Deputy Parliamentary Opposition Leader, would scramble for the ball that President Limann had been forced to drop. His purported “humiliation” at the Ussher Fort Prison, in Accra, had taught the future President absolutely nothing about the ethical principles of constitutional democratic praxis. Which is why I fail to come up with any constructive or emulative reasons or reasons why Mr. Kufuor, at 81 years old, closely homing in on his 82^nd birthday anniversary, should want to have this most scandalous narrative of his brazen and wicked betrayal of Ghana's democratic culture afforded prominent play by the country's media. It is for the same reason why I found Prof. Albert Adu-Boahen's criticism of Chairman Rawlings' overthrow of Dr. Limann to be inexcusably lame-brained. You see, on the one hand, Prof. Adu-Boahen, in his slim book titled “The Ghanaian Sphinx,” was convinced that President Limann was woefully unequal to the task of governing the country, which he claimed, was fast degenerating into chaos.

At the same time, the author of “The Ghanaian Sphinx” would rather have had the country precipitously slide into chaos or anomie, rather than having the legitimately elected President Limann so rudely pushed off the political podium by the force of arms. At any rate, he also conveniently economizes with the truth, when the former President rather disdainfully asserts that the Ghana Armed Forces' Colonel who was named Chairman of the so-called National Redemption Council (NRC) that overthrow the popularly elected government of the Busia-led Progress Party, a native of his own Atwima Constituency, in the Asante Region, in fact, that is, Mr. Ignatius (Kwasi) Kutu Acheampong, was totally unknown to the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry on the eve of the coup that toppled Prime Minister Busia on January 13, 1972. Actually, Colonel Acheampong had served as the Northern Regional Commissioner under the Generals Ankrah-, Kotoka- and Afrifa-led junta of the National Liberation Council (NLC) that overthrew the Kwame Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP) regime on February 24, 1966. You see, with my dear good, old Uncle Kofi Diawuo, the truth is always at least a partial casualty of some sort.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
July 5, 2020
E-mail: [email protected]