President Kufuor’s Forked Tongue

He has been officially retired for close to a dozen years now. And for the most part, the 82-year-old former President John Agyekum-Kufuor has been on the quite side of political events and affairs. Which is all well and good, except that the man who, in the heydays of his popularity, was affectionately nicknamed “The Gentle Giant” appears to be increasingly becoming wistful over the fact that many of the projects that he had initiated as Chief Resident of the Osu Castle, the old Danish slave-trading fort in Accra, and the last Ghanaian leader to reside there, have fast receded into oblivion. And he inescapably deserves his comeuppance, if this predicament of his direly endangered legacy could be aptly reckoned as such.

You see, rather than throw his heavy weight behind the Presidential-Electioneering Campaign of his New Patriotic Party (NPP) successor, the man with whom many of these signature projects had been hatched and implemented as major policy initiatives, an incurably vindictive Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor decided to literally plight his troth, as it were, with political and ideological opponents who were the least likely to carry on with even the most far-reaching and cross-partisan of these projects. In the end, he would be disparagingly accused having been almost exclusively fascistically fixated on what one of these cynical faux-socialist successors termed as Mr. Kufuor’s “Asante Projects,” by which, of course, a newly elected President John Evans Atta-Mills categorically meant that The Gentle Giant had effectively and by design made himself the veritable and exclusive President of Ethnic Asantes.

Which, in effect, meant that the Kufuor government had almost exclusively been composed of his kinsmen, tribesmen and women. Now, I have absolutely no interest, whatsoever, in wading into this at once cancerous and decidedly pointless debate of whether, indeed, the Atwima-Nwabiagya, rural Asante, native had put the interest of his clansmen and women over and above the far more wholesome and morally bracing interests of the Ghanaian citizenry at large. The record is there for all to see and critically evaluate and draw the necessary and relevant conclusions on and from. At any rate, what fascinated me quite a bit recently, though, was when during an interview that an unusually voluble Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor granted a television talking-heads program host, the former President smugly noted that his own birth mother had been married four times and had issues or offspring by the men in each and every one of these four conjugally promiscuous bonds.

I was in no small measure fascinated by this damning revelation because it does not appear in Mr. Kufuor’s most notable authorized biography, authored by Mr. Ivor Agyeman-Duah, and titled “JA Kufuor: Between Faith and History,” if memory serves yours truly accurately. I was in no mean measure fascinated because during his 1996 Presidential-Election Campaign against the then democratically elected Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, including one that was covered by an Accra-based BBC radio correspondent, Candidate John Kufuor, as the oldest and largest global broadcaster preferred to call him, never hesitated or missed the heart beat of a chance to remind Ghanaians that President Rawlings needed to be resoundingly voted out of power because the half-Scottish retired Ghana Airforce Flight-Lieutenant was an “Ashawo Ba,” roughly translated as “Son of a Whore.”

Now, to me, being married four times, without having been once or twice widowed, and having borne or carried the children of all four men sounded like a striking case study in serial monogamous whoring. Interestingly as well, while telling this same story to his interviewer, Mr. Kufuor had this boyish smirk on his face, almost as if to say that it was perfectly the right thing for his mother to have done, in the exact same way that many a Ghanaian woman would change her undies. The obvious thrust here, somehow, was that Mr. Kufuor’s mother was a sort of liberated woman whose clearly promiscuous exploits with the conjugal transients in her life ought to be heartily celebrated. But, somehow, the same kind of short-lived conjugal relationships in the life of Mr. Rawlings’ recently deceased mother had to be disdainfully reckoned as an egregious and irredeemable moral character foible or flaw.

Anyway, when I later turned to my wife and asked what she thought fundamentally made Mr. Kufuor’s mother any morally significantly different from Chairman Rawlings’ mother, she chuckled and asked whether I needed to be reminded of that old proverb that counseled one never to point to the direction of the hometown of one’s father with one’s left hand. And then my wife added, “Isn’t it quite obvious that Mr. Rawlings’ mother is reckoned to be a whore by Mr. Kufuor because Ms. Victoria Agbotui had white men in her life?”

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

June 6, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]