Kyerematen Served 7 Years in Kufuor’s Government, Afia Pokuaa

Her insufferable arrogance aside, broadcast journalist Afia Pokuaa (Kantimpo?) has absolutely no moral credibility to presume to cavalierly lecture President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on how to deploy or utilize the purported skills and/or talents of any individual cabinet appointee or appointees in his government, in particular those of Trade and Industry Minister Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen (See “Akufo-Addo Has Failed to Use Alan Kyerematen Well – Afia Pokuaa” Ghanaweb.com 11/3/21). You see, the idea that, somehow, Nana Akufo-Addo has deliberately prevented the Trade and Industry Minister from turning Ghana’s oil-palm industry into a Malaysia type of an economic bonanza could not be at once inexcusably absurd and irredeemably blasphemous. The fact of the matter is that Mr. Kyerematen served two terms of 8 years, depending on who is doing the count, in the government of former President John “Kofi Diawuo” Agyekum-Kufuor, and not only as the latter’s Trade and Industry Minister, but also as Minister for Presidential Special Initiatives (PSI).

If Ms. Pokuaa is really convinced that Mr. Kyerematen is endowed with the Malaysian palm-oil plantation magic, then, by all means, let this self-infatuated ethnic chauvinist and tribal bigot and nationalist prove the same to her audience and the Ghanaian people, at large, with forensically sustainable evidence. For this writer, personally, on the other hand, it was an egregious blunder for Nana Akufo-Addo to have included the man who officially and intemperately resigned his membership of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in August 2008, or thereabouts, with scarcely 4 months to that year’s historic General Election, among his major cabinet and executive appointees.

Unless Ms. Pokuaa is not the least bit interested in the factual reality of history; else, she would have soberly reckoned with the fact that it was the strategically nihilistic or self-destructive decision by Mr. Kyerematen to practically cross over party lines and into the camp of the extant main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) and, in effect, massively throw his weight and those of his critical mass of supporters and sympathizers behind the candidacies of Messrs. John Evans “Woyome” Atta-Mills, late, and John “Akonfem-Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama that ensured that it would take a protracted 8 years for the man who seismically trounced Mr. Kyerematen in the New Patriotic Party’s 2007 Presidential Primaries to accede to the Presidency.

She may not know this or perhaps the so-called Vim Lady is too engrossed in her obviously fanatical support for the possibility of a Kyerematen Presidency, so she may very well need to be reminded of the glaringly inescapable fact that decisions like the morbidly self-serving one that Alan Cash, as Mr. Kyerematen is widely and popularly known, made in late July or August 2008 have consequences. And like all humans, Mr. Kyerematen does not stand well over and above the scientific laws of actions and reactions or decisions and consequences. It is also rather amusingly absurd for Ms. Pokuaa to be calling on President Akufo-Addo to emulate former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, the man who is widely regarded as the master-brain behind Mr. Kyerematen’s dastardly attempt to royally sabotage the presidential ambitions of Mr. Kufuor’s former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice and, subsequently, Foreign and Regional Integration Minister.

You see, the incontrovertible fact of the matter is that whatever legacy can be legitimately claimed for or attributed to Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor, such as the establishment of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which, by the way, had been effectively torpedoed by the succeeding National Democratic Congress-sponsored Mills-Mahama regime, is still in existence today primarily due to the inimitably visionary foresight of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Her deliberate attempt at disingenuousness can only seriously undermine the credibility and moral heft or weight of the Vim Lady herself who, by the way, has absolutely no enviable professional track-record of either being a progressive journalist or being remarkably supportive of visionary and forward-looking leaders like President Akufo-Addo.

It is also an open secret, after all, that Ms. Afia Pokuaa is rabidly anti-New Patriotic Party, especially when the substantive NPP-sponsored President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana has not hailed from the Asante Region, or even the Presidential Nominee of the New Patriotic Party. She may have also so scandalously soon forgotten the torrents of hate-filled nose-thumbing insults that the Vim Lady so generously volleyed at the likes of Mr. Ayikoi Otoo, the former Kufuor-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, in the wake of the 2008 General Election, among dozens of other New Patriotic Party stalwarts and Parliamentary Candidates, so those of us who vividly remember may need to play back to her, her shameless record of anti-NPP tirade or language of abuse. The irony here is that in 2008, the Vim Lady was convinced that the worst ministerial and cabinet appointees in Ghana’s history almost exclusively belonged to the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party.

Now, the Vim Lady would also have the tenure of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor envisaged as the most exemplary of its kind and, literally, the best thing that ever happened to Ghana since Mr. Tetteh Quarshie (aka Tetteh Kwasi) brought the first cocoa pods and beans from Fernando Po, that is, Equatorial Guinea in the 1880s. Then also, who told Nana Afia Pokuaa that President Akufo-Addo’s private residence is not inundated with visitors from all over the world, seeking the advice of Fourth-Republican Ghana’s most progressive and visionary and easily the best leader?

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

November 6, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]