Does Carlos Ahenkorah Deserve His “Parliamentary” Beating?

He may be utterly confused by the physical punishment which he sustained in this event in which the Tema-West New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament behaved like a street urchin and a thug. But, of course, I was not the least bit flabbergasted because in the leadup to the 2020 General Election, I penned and published an article in which I asked for the immediate and summary withdrawal of Mr. Carlos Kingsley Ahenkorah from the ticket of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), whose Tema-West primary he had just recently won. My request or, rather, call for his immediate and summary withdrawal was on account of the fact that the Akyem-Asuom native – I have this information from a reliable source – had criminally flouted a COVID-19 personal and social protection directive which reportedly culminated in the sickness and death of one of his electioneering-campaign aides or operatives.

The subject of this column would later claim that his doctors had assured him that he was not a vector for the spreading of the Coronavirus. Now, I mention Mr. Ahenkorah’s hometown of Akyem-Asuom because that was also where my late mother was born, on Monday, May 28, 1934. My maternal grandfather, The Rev. Theodore Henry (Yawbe) Sintim(-Aboagye), was at the time the District Pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana. My mother, Dorothy Tomina (Adwoa) Aninwaa Sintim, had been born one of two twin girls, the elder one, by her name of “Aninwaa or Aniniwaa, of course. I have been trying to remember the “Christian Name” of my other Little Mom without any success. Another one of my six uncles on that side of my family, two steps behind or after my mother, Mr. Nicholas (Yaw) Ofosuhene-Sintim, 1938, would also be born at Akyem-Asuom and named after the Chief of the town, namely, Nana Ofosuhene Apenteng.

Wait a minute: actually, all I wanted to say in the preceding paragraph is the fact that in my last article about Mr. Ahenkorah, which was sometime during the second half of last year, I had painstakingly remarked on the fact that whenever Mr. Ahenkorah had made the banner news headlines, it had always been connected to a fight or a violent incident. The man is almost my own age and capable of having his own grandchildren or raising his own grandnephews and grandnieces. But, rather bizarrely, he still behaves like a brash and rambunctious teenager. I have seen and hurriedly read another news story in which he has threatened to sue the man who was widely reported to have brutally assaulted him by delivering to the sides of his face several dirty slaps in rapid succession. That man, of course, is none other than the equally notorious and brash Alhaji “Jihad” Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka, the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Kumasi-Asawase.

There is something interesting about the foregoing report because earlier on, I had received a WhatsApp videoclip on which Mr. Ahenkorah was seen and heard vehemently denying that he had, indeed, been meted some thunderous smacks to his head by the hotheaded Zongo Boy from Kumasi-Asawase. I chuckled to myself and concluded that maybe this cantankerous man is trying to man it up. After all, haven’t our sages of yore said that “Nobody killed Antwi-Boasiako,” but that “It was Boasiako himself who delivered his head to the royal executioner”? And then just this morning, I chanced across another news report in which the Tema-West’s NPP-MP was reported to be bitterly complaining about having been severely beaten up to pulp by his political opponents of the main opposition National Democratic Congress and ended up being hospitalized, for several days, at Ghana’s oldest flagship medical center, namely, the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital.

Incidentally, yours truly also spent quite a considerable amount of time in his preteen years at the Fevers Unit of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital (See “You Assaulted Me and I’m Coming for You All – Carlos Ahenkorah Threatens Muntaka and Other ‘Miscreant’ MPs” Modernghana.com 1/11/21). Maybe on second thoughts, the mercilessly beaten Tema-West MP, who claims to have suffered “Subdural Hematoma,” some form of internal bleeding, I suppose, realizes that he could make his assailants pay decently or handsomely for their crimes. After all, the victim is also a businessowner who knows how to invest hard-earned money from amateur kickboxing in our over-glorified National Chamber of Democracy. But, of course, the part that amusingly staggered me a little bit was Mr. Ahenkorah’s rather bald claim that his clearly well-deserved sound beating, at least on the surface of matters – a legitimately constituted court of law still has to decide this – was completely unprovoked.

And now, once again, the fired former Deputy Trade and Industry Minister, perhaps with an eye set towards a cabinet appointment in the offing, is denying that he has threatened to revenge himself on his kickboxing creamers. Maybe he deserved to have been physically left alone because, after all, isn’t ballot-snatching the foremost occupation of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, for which crime they have been routinely let off the hook by the megalomaniacal and kleptocratic likes of Little Dramani and General Mosquito? The part that amuses me to no end about this rather infantile and morally unenlightened behavior of our parliamentarians, though, is this weird and funny notion that, somehow, our National Assembly Representatives (NAR) are a law unto themselves.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

January 11, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]