A Resonant Success Just the Way It Ought to Be

It has taken nearly a quarter century, finally, for the Appeal for Funds geared towards the major renovation of the landmark hospital constructed by the British colonial regime and the Kwame Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), and a Britain-based construction company called GEE Walter & Slater Company Limited, to be launched by The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II. And by all the available and reliable media accounts, His Majesty’s clarion call was a resonant success (See “Heal Komfo Anokye: See List of Massive Contributions an Hour after Asantehene’s Appeal” Ghanaweb.com 11/11/23). Interestingly, it was while conducting a cursory background research for this article that I came to understand how the nickname of “GEE” came to be associated with Ghana’s second-largest civilian hospital, the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH), whose landmark construction was completed in 1954, the very same year that my parents had their first son in Berekum, in the present-day Akufo-Addo redesignated Bono Region.

Now, it goes without saying that this most laudable call has been well overdue for at least 40 years, that is, about a score years well before the glorious accession of the present monarch of Ghana’s most significant royal institutional establishment and the most widely recognized and venerated around the globe. For now, at least, Yours Truly has decided to steer clear of the raging debate over whether, indeed, The Asantehene is a Paramount Chief or a King in the same vein or status as King Charles of Great Britain or any of the couple, or so, countries on the African Continent and other parts of the world. Anyway, what the preceding statement of observation means is that even as relatively far back as 1984, when Yours Truly departed the Garden City, as the Asante Regional Capital is well known and affectionally called all over the ECOWAS Subregion and, perhaps, even well beyond, the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital was in dire need of a major renovation and significant upgrade, including the spatial and the structural expansion of its physical-plant facilities.

In those apocalyptic days of “Revolution,” which, in retrospect, was actually a “Devolution,” the megalomaniacal usurpers of our then still young and fragile but, nonetheless, healthily fledgling democratic culture and dispensation, that is, the Flt-Lt. Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led bloody junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), was far more fixated on the consolidation of stratocratic power and the ad-hoc dictation of policy in place of a coherently and a systematically programed national development policy initiative or agenda. There was very little that could be aptly envisaged to muster the practical scrutiny of what could be meaningfully labeled or characterized as a national development agenda. A withering disrespect for legitimately invested traditional authorities became the order of the day. So, in retrospect, it was scarcely any surprise that cardinal institutional establishments like the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital would be callously allowed to fall into such abject desuetude or total disrepair.

Of course, our present monarch or Paramount Chief Non-Pareil started out very on his custodial journey of ensuring the socioeconomic and cultural stability of not only the good citizens of the great former Asante Confederation over whom he and his ancestors and immediate and recent predecessors had been duly sworn to rule and protect for generations or at least a couple of centuries. Yes, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, started out almost flawlessly, which was why he quickly rose in fame and prominence above all his peers in the entire land and earned the accolade of “King Solomon.” That globally celebrated brightest moment of the King of the Ancient Israelites who, truth be told, was not really as smart or brilliant as the authors of the Hebrew Bible and the most distinguished prophets of the time have made this otherwise most scandalously profligate monarch out to be.

In our time also, as it is naturally to be expected, His Majesty The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, has not escaped his fair share of criticism and public upbraiding some of which are perfectly tangible and very well deserved, as well as others that may be aptly deemed to untenably verge on pure hearsay, largely involving properties that Otumfuo Nana Osei-Tutu, Opemusuo, II, may have illegally or illegitimately acquired abroad and overseas. And the acquisition of a couple, or so, ethnically and/or racially exotic concubines which, by the way, may not be altogether or totally prohibited by the norms of his stature, social status and time. Still, the “Heal Komfo Anokye” hospital renovation campaign caught Yours Truly almost by complete surprise. Not because, here again, the immortalized Great Asante Nation-Builder of Akyem, Akuapem and Akwamu descent was really capable of taking ill at the present moment in time. The fact of the matter is that it is us, the living, who may be in dire need of healing. And I mean, real healing in every sense of the word.

Ironically, this most laudable moment comes at exactly the same moment that the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu-commanded Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have been telling the International Community that the construction of hospital facilities in Gaza and The West Bank (of the Jordan River) may, after all, not be exactly what Yahweh, The Almighty, ordered for their kinsmen and women and cousins in the Hamas-ruled Stateless Republic of Palestine. You bet Nana Osei-Tutu has been studiously watching and listening to the news blasting out of Gaza, in particular how every bit of news footage beamed and streamed on the Atlanta, Georgia-headquartered Cable News Network (CNN-TV) has had to be “carefully” scrutinized and “rabbinically” sanitized by the uniformed green beret-wearing likes of Lt-Col. Jonathan Conricus and Lt-Col. Peter Lerner. Now, it looks as if, for the most part, even the smartest among humanity are wired to only best appreciate what we have been taking for granted, almost in perpetuity, until it suddenly dawns on us that we could very well lose our most important and most precious and prized possessions within a split-second’s blitzkrieg of our mortal enemies. Our very lives, that is.

Then also, Nana Osei-Tutu, II, must also have heard the deafening reechoing of the flurry or flash flood of criticism that barreled almost over the wrought-iron gates of his relatively well-appointed Manhyia Palace, when he surprisingly and conspicuously failed to show his lavishly bejeweled neckless head at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, when Ghana’s present First Lady, Mrs. Rebecca Akufo-Addo, singlehandedly raised enough funds to, finally, complete the decades-abandoned KATH Maternity Ward that had been started by the savagely slain son of the sacred Asante soil, the epically disgraced and unspeakably humiliated Gen. Ignatius (Kwasi Kutu) Acheampong of Asante-Trabuom. I also thought about the solemn promise that Nana Osei-Tutu, II, made to the Great People of Akuapem-Awukugua, the globally renowned home village of the agelessly acclaimed Hero and Magical Architect of the Golden Stool, to either renovate or reconstruct the house in which Daasebre Nana Kwame Frimpong-Manso(n) lived and practiced his golden healer’s trade, prior to his historic relocation to Asante-Agona in the late seventeenth century, if memory serves Yours Truly accurately.

Now, as it turns out, Barima Kwaku Duah, as Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, was also popularly known prior to ascending the Opemusuo Stool, may very well have to add to his “To-Do List,” the equally sacred and glorious name of Akyem-Tafo, the maternal moorings of the immortalized son of the Great Akwamu State. Kudos, Menuapanyin! Yaa Juaben ne Kokofu Dehyee!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
November 12, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]