Ghanaian Voters Are Much Smarter than Kennedy Agyapong the Shakedown Artist

Kennedy “Akom-Prigozhin” Ohene Agyapong has spent virtually the past two decades intensely engaged in active politics, mostly shaking down the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for fat contractual awards, largely undeserved, many of which may very well have been unduly and illegally inflated, financially, all at the expense of hardworking and grossly underpaid Ghanaian civil servants and blue-collar workers. And then to hear this citizen of the precolonial slave-trading state(s) of Assin proudly and shamelessly brag about making scandalously humongous profits and legally illegitimate returns out of the same. Now, for those of you grossly misguided fanatical supporters of the Assin-Central Member of Parliament, on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party, this is a striking example of traditional or classical bribery and corruption, the type Ghanaians have always known and roundly condemned in the postcolonial era.

The fact of the matter is that, like his globally infamous slave-trading precolonial Assin ancestors – remember The Slave River lies in his part of the country (My profound apologies to all the decent and genuinely diligent citizens and inhabitants of present-day Assin traditional polity or sub-polity) – Kennedy Ohene Agyapong is a man conspicuously bereft of any scruples or remarkable moral principles; he is a knave, in classical Shakespearean parlance. Which is why it comes as downright comical to hear the self-described, self-made business mogul bitterly and caustically accusing his political rivals and opponents in the August 26 New Patriotic Party’s Superdelegates Electoral College Primary, intended to rationally halve the number of presidential aspirants for the November 4 party presidential primary, of having intimidated and financially induced some of these Superdelegates to cast their ballots in favor of these unnamed rivals and inveterate political opponents (See “Some Delegates Took Money and Cast ‘Stupid Votes’ on August 26 – Ken Agyapong Booms” Ghanaweb.com 9/18/23).

It is downright comical because a little over seven or eight years ago, it was the Assin-Dompim native, from the Central Region, who openly and arrogantly weaponized his monetary wealth to ensure the scandalous ousting of the extant General-Secretary of the New Patriotic Party, to wit, the late Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie – on the patently capricious grounds that the Asante-Wonoo-born alumnus of the University of Ghana and the Ghana Law School had been conducting the affairs of the party in contradistinction to the direction personally anticipated by the critic. He was actually an assailant, when the Dear Reader carefully ponders the critical context of the Kennedy Agyapong “Monecratic” coup against the onetime resident of the UK capital of London. Now, it is also quite obvious that the last time that he looked into the mirror, the diarrheal foulmouthed proprietor of the Oman Multimedia Communications Network espied the Ghost of Sir John in a MacBethan/-ian sort of spectral disorientation.

Else, the “Akom-Prigozhin” would not be so deliriously and intemperately accusing his intellectual and political betters of having strategically resorted to the same seamy tactics that he so maliciously used to effectively wreck the otherwise unarguably brilliant career of Mr. Owusu-Afriyie, Divine Providence give him eternal strength. You see, Mr. Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, the autocratic National Chairman of the country’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), would not have become the sort of Trumpian political specter that he is to both Ghana’s robust democratic culture and the very existence and destiny of our beloved nation at large, today, if a pathologically self-absorbed Akom-Prigozhin Agyapong had not so viciously and savagely elected to professionally liquidate President Akufo-Addo’s foremost kingmaker. It also well appears that a “Super-Pompous” Kwame Ohene Agyapong would have each and every one of his rivals for the 2024 Presidential Nomination of the ruling New Patriotic Party play by the antiseptic rules of an emulative democratic culture, except this Rhodesian Colossus who so imperiously and megalomaniacally supposes that who stands above all else and then some, as New Yorkers are wont to say. Fat chance!

Of course, we are all also well aware of the fact that his thinly veiled innuendo about some rival candidates or presidential aspirants having crudely used intimidation tactics and generous financial inducements to unfairly cannibalize a lion’s share of the Superdelegates’ Votes was inescapably an allusion to the Vice-President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, a man who unarguably stands over and above the horrid pack, for the most part, professionally and intellectually, as far as the managerial experience of the country is concerned. He is definitely a talkative nonpareil, but it is not very clear to many a sober and critically thinking Ghanaian citizen, whether there is much that the longtime, self-confessed New York City hustler has to say that is pregnant with common sense or the sort of acumen and managerial foresight and/or insight needed to significantly move our beloved nation at least a notch up the development ladder.

You see, for the Akom-Prigozhin, for most of the past two decades that he has actively been engaged in politics, it has almost wholly or exclusively been about lining up his wallet and bank accounts with unscrupulously extorted contractual shakedown awards from the New Patriotic Party-sponsored governments of both former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor and, presently, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. He may not want to publicly admit this because the Akom-Prigozhin feels much too big for his breeches, as it were. But the unvarnished fact of the matter is that the man who selfishly refused to campaign for his party in the Assin-North Constituency because, once again, as he bitterly and childishly complained at the time, the Chief Resident of Jubilee House was unmistakably smack behind the presidential-electioneering bid of the Walewale native, from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region.

Which was absolutely nothing short of comical asininity, in view of the fact that when it comes to the Herculean ascent of the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the erstwhile Agyekum-Kufuor government, absolutely no nonfamilial associate of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo’s, with the conspicuous exception of the late Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie, could credibly, creditably and confidently claim to have contributed to the resonant success of the former Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa-South Constituency, in the Eastern Region, than Alhaji Bawumia. Maybe the Akom-Prigozhin had been counting on the kind of “Specious Neutrality” so characteristically cunningly and deftly pulled over the eyes of the late former Vice-President Aliu Mahama and his supporters by the Agyekum-Kufuor and Mpiani Faction of the New Patriotic Party, in the runup to the 2008 Presidential Election.

But that the blowhard father of approximately a dozen children, at the last count – there may actually be more – from several different mothers was among the least qualified aspirants who recently ran for the 2024 Presidential Nomination Ticket of the New Patriotic Party, is eloquently attested by the fact that in the 20 years that he has been actively engaged in partisan politics on the ticket of the ruling New Patriotic Party (Now, who said that I am loathe to the NPP’s accolade of “Ruling”?) Kennedy Agyapong has, by his own openly confessed choice, not held any cabinet portfolio or significant public office, besides such patent boondoggles as Chair of a Board, that is public positions of very little albeit generously paid responsibility. Which immediately tells the critically thinking and studious observer of Fourth Republican Ghanaian Political Culture, that Candidate Agyapong cannot be seriously counted upon to be a disciplined team player of the kind with collaborative skills direly needed to lift Ghana out of the seemingly intractable socioeconomic quagmire in which our beloved nation has been stuck for as long as any mature adult Ghanaian citizen can remember, with the possible exception of the I K Acheampong-led junta of the National Redemption Council (NRC) and, even far less so, the Supreme Military Council (SMC-1).

To hear Kevin Baidoo Taylor mordantly tell it in his all-too-familiar class, for Akom-Prigozhin Agyapong, it is all about the moolah, that is mercilessly shaking down the Akufo-Addo government for ministerial cabinet concessions which, acting as a piranha-like middleman, he in turn retails to his surrogates and then privately collecting what clearly amounts to “Contractual Commissions” from these poor and unfortunate souls. If, indeed, he really knows the Judeo-Christian Bible, as he recently claimed, boastfully, in an interview, Kwame Ohene Agyapong would definitely have heard Jesus Christ of Nazareth say: “He that aspires to be ranked the greatest among you must, first, learn to serve by washing and oiling your feet.” You bet the Akom-Prigozhin literally slept over these paraphrased lines just last night.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of Emglish
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
November 12, 2023
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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