Impact, Not Size, Little Manasseh!

There is a vast difference between establishing one’s own impactful niche-making lucrative business enterprise, however spatially small, and just being thrust onto the pinnacle of an already well-established academic institutional establishment whose administrative and fiscal contours are primarily underwritten by the Ghanaian taxpayer. That is the big-sea difference between the professional profiles of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, which investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni woefully fails to appreciate and/or recognize (See “If Akufo-Addo Who Managed a Small Law Firm Is President, Why Not a Former Vice-Chancellor? – Manasseh” (AfricaNewsAnalysis.com 7/12/20).

At any rate, Mr. Awuni is guilty of rather cynically comparing apples and oranges here because Vice-Presidential Candidate Opoku-Agyemang is not running head-to-head against the most dynamic, visionary and progressive Fourth-Republican Ghanaian leader. Rather, she is running as the veritable political sidekick, my profound apologies to Mrs. Matilda Amissah-Arthur, to Mr. John Dramani Mahama, the former President the Founding-Father of whose own political party has incessantly described as the most thoroughgoing corrupt leader in postcolonial Ghana. And guess what? Chairman Jerry John Rawlings must know what he is talking about because Mr. Mahama served as, first, Deputy Communications Minister and, then, as substantive Communications Minister under the “democratically elected” two-term tenure of the bloody butcher and Nigerian taxpayer extortionist, in the felicitous and memorable words of Prof. Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s Nobel Literature Prize Laureate.

So, what Mr. Awuni really ought to be doing here is to be drawing a comparative analysis between the political and professional profiles of President Akufo-Addo and Candidate Mahama who, by the way, Mr. Awuni himself has deftly exposed as a pathologically payola-addicted thievish political scam-artist. In the legal field, we know that Nana Akufo-Addo is authoritatively cited in Ghana’s law school textbooks and our law courts almost more than any other legal light and/or practitioner. His presentations in court are also widely known to routinely attract battalions of lawyers and law students. The same observations cannot be authoritatively and creditably made for former President John Mahama, in the fields of history and communications, and Nana Opoku-Agyeman, in the fields of University Management and Administration and Literary Studies. In the field of Gender Studies, Nana Opoku-Agyekum is, at best, marginally cited. Thus, in terms of job performance, both Little Dramani and his Atta-Mills murder coverup presidential “Spare-Tire,” in the words of Little Dramani himself, are absolutely no match for Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

From the landmark resolution of the protracted Yendi/Dagbon Chieftaincy Crisis, the crafting and implementation of the seismic Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, as Ghana’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, which has, ironically, opened the floodwaters of free speech and the rampant and riotous political abuse of the man who significantly enhanced Ghana’s democratic culture, the introduction of the fee-free Senior High School System, the genius resuscitation of the Mills-Mahama-bankrupted National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), the introduction of the Volkswagen and Fiat assembling plants, industrial and agricultural development, roadways and railroad development. The list goes on and on and on and on…. To be certain, the proper comparison ought to be between Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, the Oxbridge-educated former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana and former IMF-World Bank operative, and the NDC’s Vice-Presidential Candidate, Naana Opoku-Agyemang.

But, of course, we also know that it is decidedly a no-contest area. It is also rather cynical and morally defeatist for Mr. Awuni to assert that if Naana Opoku-Agyemang does not bring any positive edge to the rag-tag Mahama Presidential Campaign, she also does not take anything away. Maybe this is another way of conceding defeat on behalf of his political idols and principals. Like Little Dramani, Mansseh Azure Awuni has yet to be able to meaningfully differentiate between the social construct of gender and genitals or the female genitalia. The real fact of the matter, though, is that Nana Opoku-Agyemang brings her own leaden baggage of gross administrative and professional incompetence as Education Minister, when she callously canceled the Teacher-Trainee Allowance and could not supply even common chalk to our elementary school pupils and our teachers. You definitely cannot make the same defeatist claim on behalf of Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, because Prof. Bawumia has a résumé that is laden with sound and palpable achievements.

Candidate Naana Opoku-Agyemang, on the other hand, has this embarrassingly padded CV on which she claims to be sitting on the Governing Board of the New Jersey-based Africa World Press (AWP) which, by the way, does not really exist. You see, as somebody who has omitted real achievements from my CV, such as Outstanding Teaching Award form Indiana State University, Terre Haute, where I taught Africana Studies or African History and African-American Studies during the 1994-95 Academic Year – I still have the certificate somewhere in a suitcase – as well as an Outstanding Community Reporting Awards, three times, from the Columbia University School of Journalism, while I was an undergraduate in English, African-American Studies and Communications at City College of New York of CUNY, because it was awarded to my classmates and I as a team or collective between 1988 and 1990, for City College’s The Campus newspaper, have a knack for real achievements when I come across one.

I know the chimerical existence of the Board of Directors of the Africa World Press, because I have known Mr. Kassahun Checole for some 30 years, beginning from my student days at the City College of New York (CCNY) of the City University of New York, the alma mater of General Colin Luther Powell and Dr. Jonas Salk, of polio vaccine fame, where the Ethiopian-Eritrean native regularly sold his books on a table tops on the plaza in front of the NAC (North Academic) Building, with his parked van or minivan a few meters away on Convent Avenue. Ask Naana, when was the last time that she attended an Africa World Press’ Board Meeting. The problem with the Vice-Presidential Candidacy of Naana Opoku-Agyemang is that she has cheaply allowed herself to be used to paper up a heavily scandal-damaged national security risk Candidate Mahama. She is veritably a tainted and indecently smudged wall flower.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

July 12, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]