
He does not impress me one bit, as New Yorkers often say. We are talking about the loud-talking blowhard New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Assin-Central, in the former major slave-trading enclave of the Central Region, Mr. Kennedy (Kwame) Ohene Agyapong – aka Comrade Akom-Prigozhin – when he traipses around the country bragging about being the employer of some 7,000 individuals who this admittedly remarkable entrepreneur claims to be paying each and every month, as somehow, making him the best qualified presidential-candidacy aspirant of Ghana’s ruling party in the leadup to the 2024 General Election (See “Strategists Don’t Go to IMF – Ken Agyapong Slams Govt’s Poor Economic Performance” Modernghana.com 7/17/23).
The innuendo, we are informed, was supposed to literally cut Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, Ghana’s two-term Deputy-Chief Executive of State, down to size. You see, there have only been two, two-term Vice-Presidents in Fourth-Republican Ghana. And both of these Vice-Presidents were, by the way, produced by the Danquah-Busia-Dombo-inspired New Patriotic Party. And they are, namely, the late Mr. Aliu Mahama and, presently, the Buckingham, UK, University cum Oxbridge-educated Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia. So, I guess one could aptly say that it is only the Walewale native from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region who, among all 10 New Patriotic Party’s 2024 Presidential Aspirants, has what it really takes to manage the affairs of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.
I recently came across a Tik Tok videoclip in which several articulated trucks were shown heavily loaded with bags of rice, and other food items, that The Akom-Prigozhin was reported to have shipped to the Asante Regional Capital of Kumasi, well ahead of the November 4, 2023 New Patriotic Party-sponsored Presidential Primaries, as a vote-buying inducement for the 200,000-plus party delegates who will be voting to select one of the five Presidential-Candidacy Aspirants who will be representing the ruling party in the December 2024 Presidential Election. Evidently, The Akom-Prigozhin who has been feeding greedily and incessantly from the taxpayer-underwritten trough of the New Patriotic Party for nearly 16 years, believes that presenting a one-time payola package of rice and beans and canned sardines and corned beef, a piddling amount of the millions of dollars of contractual loots that he has been awarded by former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor and, presently, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, will be enough to buy him the Presidency and Jubilee House Residency for the next four years, beginning from January 7, 2025, or thereabouts.
Somebody far more sensible ought to tell The Akom-Prigozhin that he would be far better off to put each and every one of these 200,000-plus party delegates on a monthly salary for all the four years that he intends to occupy the Presidency, as a surefire means of proving to Ghanaians that he really has what it takes to sustain them economically for a considerably while, and not cavalierly presume to insult our intelligence with a scandalously cheap Jacobian purchase of our allegiance and electoral support with a day or two’s supply of junk food, as Americans would say. You see, long before he assumed the democratic reins of governance as Second-in-Command of both the political establishment of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo-inspired Elephant Party, as the ruling New Patriotic Party is also popularly known by its pachyderm insignia, Candidate Bawumia Was busy traveling the length and the breadth of the country building toilet and borehole wells and other sanitation facilities, free-of-charge and at his own personal expense, for needy residents of cities and towns like Tamale, Nsawam-Adoagyiri and the Amedzofe Teacher-Training College, in the National Democratic Congress’ electoral stranglehold of the Volta Region, on the strategically savvy advice of political watchers and pundits like Sincerely Yours.
Back then, as he vividly recalls, this writer reminded Alhaji Bawumia that his electioneering-campaign platform would have better legs to stand on, if he could point to a few crucial or remarkable projects that he had established or undertaken for the creature comfort of the very people whose electoral mandate he was earnestly seeking as an opposition party politician and leader. You see, unlike The Akom-Prigozhin man who has been intemperately bragging about having employed some 7,000 workers, from whose slavish sweat and blood he reaps humongous profits around-the-clock, literally speaking, the now-Vice-President Bawumia reaps absolutely nothing from the most dirt-poor users of these voluntarily constructed amenities or facilities. I would not be the least bit gobsmacked if it also turns out that The Akom-Prigozhin charges a fee for every employee who uses any of his places of convenience at the workplace, including canteen facilities.
We need to also emphatically and categorically point out the fact that the very noble decision by the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana to engage his fine mind in public service, does not absolutely in any way make Vice-President Bawumia any less important or significant in the scheme of our national political culture. To be certain, a man who looks at the bigger picture by way of ensuring that all or the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens are provided with the basic necessities of life, is far more useful to Ghanaian society than a man whose sole and overriding objective in life is to inordinately and filthily amass wealth as an opportunistic instrument or mechanism for making others feel less important and psychologically unworthy of existence in civilized society. To be certain, this is an unmistakable indication of the inferiority complex of a man who primarily envisages his human worth and dignity purely on the strength of his material acquisition, and the number of wives and concubines such material acquisitions have enabled him to buy or gain access to. In this respect, it could aptly be argued that it is Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, rather than The Akom-Prigozhin, who has the higher calling in this life.
But in the present instance, we are far more interested in learning about the conditions under which each and every one of these 7,000-plus employees slaves themselves for the benefit of the Assin-Dompim native. For example, does boss “Prigozhin” provide free breakfasts and lunches or canteen services for all of these employees or even at heavily discounted prices or salary-deduction rates? As well, does our Entrepreneur-of-Fortune provide each and every one of his workers with a comprehensive health insurance package and retirement benefits? Or our narcissistic brother from Assin-Dompin is just another bottom-line kind of slumlord? He may also, indeed, own the biggest cold store on the African Continent, as he claims. But the most pertinent question to ask here regards the fact of whether his cold store business has branches in each and every one of the 16 administrative regions of Ghana, as a means of ensuring the availability and the stability of the prices of this most significant dietary ingredient or seafood, as they are commonly known and routinely called hereabouts in the United States of America, all-year-round in Ghana? That is what real strategists do, if The Akom-Prigozhin man really wants to know.
You see, merely owning the biggest cold store in Ghana or even the entire African Continent, and haughtily and incessantly bragging about it, is of far less importance than the real or practical impact of such laudable facility on the prevailing market prices or the national and the Continental African economy as a whole. It is also downright preposterous for Akom-Prigozhin to accuse Vice-President Bawumia of freeloading on the government and at the expense of Ghanaian taxpayers, when he is well aware of the fact that the Vice-President is unarguably one of the most hardworking elected officials in the country. Take the following reading, Dear Reader: “With my Steel Plant, I am employing thousands of workers in this country…. I have the biggest Cold Store in the whole of Africa; as for you, the government pays your house girls, pays your security, you are living in a government bungalow.”
Now, this is inexcusably depraved and absurd because as a Member of Parliament, Akom-Prigozhin draws a monthly salary at the expense of Ghanaian taxpayers, as well as quadrennial Ex-Gratia Bonanzas. Now, what kind of formidable strategist fights over government contracts like a street boy? As well as claims that his primary political objective is to invest his money towards the electoral triumphs of the New Patriotic Party, with his sole and first order of business being the solicitation and the awarding of the biggest contracts to him from the government? And this kleptocratic robber-baron would have Ghanaians believe that he cannot be corrupted? I mean, if Akom-Prigozhin is not the quintessence of corruption, in toto, who else is?
By the way, I wedged and edged in the name of the late Mr. Alexander Bosompem of Akyem-Tafo, because not only was “Nanaoo!” as he was also popularly known, my late father’s classmate zmong the 1948 Entry Group at the Gold Coast Government Technical Teacher-Training College, in Takoradi, later renamed as the Government Secondary Technical School (GSTS), by President Kwame Nkrumah, and later renamed Ghana Secondary Technical School by the I K Acheampong-led junta of the National Redemption Council (NRC), subsequently renamed the Supreme Military Council (SMC-1), Mr. Bosompem’s son was also my classmate at the Presbyterian Middle Boys’ Boarding Schools, Akuapem-Akropong, SALEM between 1973 and 1976. You see, it is highly likely that the first richest Ghanaian citizens of the 20th Century were from seminal cocoa-rich soils of Akyem-Abuakwa and the Eastern Region of the 1890s and well into the 1940s and the 1950s, and not from the blood-stained slave-trading precolonial and colonial states of the Two Assins, namely, Apimanim and Atandaso. The Akom-Prigozhin gives Assin natives a very bad name and an execrably poor image and reputation as a people.
*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
August 27, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]