The Agyekum-Kufuor Years Critically Reviewed

In view of the fact of 2024’s being a landmark and a watershed Election Year in Ghana, we find it opportune to critically revisit one quite remarkable and brilliantly researched book on one of the country’s most significant Fourth-Republican Leaders and definitely a fairly important postcolonial Ghanaian politician, namely, Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor, popularly known and affectionately called “The Gentle Giant.” The book in question is titled Notes from the Public Square and subtitled What Ghanaians Said and How They Felt During Kufuor’s Presidency (Accra, Ghana: DAkpabli & Associates, 2021). Authored by John (Nana Kwame) Osae-Kwapong, an erudite and a prolific Political Scientist with a Doctorate from George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, hereabouts in the United States of America, a Master of Science degree in Public Administration from Clark-Atlanta University, in the historic State of Georgia, and the Bachelor of Arts degree, also in Political Science, from Houghton College, New York State, the book is both highly readable and insightful.

Over the past decade-and-half, Dr. Osae-Kwapong has served in Senior Administrative Positions in such nationally and internationally reputable tertiary academies as Columbia University, Hofstra University, Bernard Baruch College of the City University of New York and, presently, Western Connecticut State University, where he is Associate Vice-President for Institutional Effectiveness. In the main, Notes from the Public Square critically examines the general quality-of-life impact of 30 years of democratic political culture in Fourth-Republican Ghana. What is most significant to highlight here and a feature that one would not find in the far better known Agyekum-Kufuor biography, authored by Ivor Agyeman-Duah, for example, is the relatively higher quality of democratic governance as exemplarily exhibited by the neoliberal leadership of the Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), on the one hand, and the faux-revolutionary leadership of the late Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-chaperoned ragtag regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

As it is to be expected, the author reaches the authoritative conclusion that the leadership of the Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party provided many an ordinary Ghanaian citizen with a more secure sense of socioeconomic prosperity and a more civically inclusive and a cohesive sense of national identity. Institutionally speaking, the political culture of the New Patriotic Party is also envisaged to evoke a deeper sense of trust and confidence in ways that could not be vouched for the autocratic leadership of the faux-socialist and populist Social-Darwinian temperament and mindset of the National Democratic Congress. To the preceding end, author Osae-Kwapong writes:

“Parliament is vested with the power to make the laws of the land. In addition to its lawmaking powers, Parliament is vested with important oversight responsibilities. By design, it is expected that Parliament is the key representative institution of the people. They are the channels through which citizens, ideally, speak on matters of importance. Therefore, whatever Parliament does must be guided by the people they represent and what ideally is in their best interest. Trust in Parliament improved by nine-percentage points between 2002 and 2005…. To put this in perspective, the average level of trust in Parliament during the Kufuor years was 42-percent, compared to 25-percent [in the preceding eight years],” when the Rawlings-led regime of the National Democratic Congress held the helm of the nation’s affairs.

Equally significant, the author of Notes from the Public Square underscores the fact that relentless negative NDC propaganda spiel and all, the forensically verifiable fact of the matter is that when it comes to the conduct of elections in the country, the leadership of the social-intervention oriented New Patriotic Party is the better protector of the integrity of the sovereign mandate of the Ghanaian citizenry: “I often liken to Electoral Commission to the role of a referee. Although members of the commission are appointed by the President, including the Chair, they are expected to be independent of political influence. The Constitution structures their removal from office in such a way that their tenure of office is generally guaranteed and insulated from a change of government from one political party to another, with the hope that such changes will have no material effect on the continued tenure in office of the Commission’s members, especially the chair…. An average of 37-percent [of Ghanaian citizens] said that they trusted the EC during the Kufuor years, compared to 21-percent in the preceding years of the Rawlings’ regime.”

Now, the preceding two comparative statistical figures are in themselves not very encouraging by any stretch of the imagination. But then so has it been generally the case right hereabouts in the United States of America, the so-called Leader of the Free and the Civilized World, the last couple of years. In other words, this may very well be a global trend. Still, what is most significant to highlight here, in the frenetic runup to the 2024 General Election, is the fact that according to the author of Notes from the Public Square, the 2024 General Election has twice a better chance of being more freely and fairly conducted under the watch of the New Patriotic Party than has been the case under the country’s presently main opposition National Democratic Congress.

It has, indeed, been uncontestably established that Ghanaians had a bitter taste of the NDC’s election-rigging shenanigans in the wake of the 2012 Presidential Election, when the extant General-Secretary of the latter party sheepishly confessed to the host of an Accra FM radio talk-show host, in a barely audible tone, that the abject lack of vigilance on the part of the New Patriotic Party’s polling agents, observers and assigns had criminally resulted in a clearly undeserved electoral victory being scandalously declared in favor of the then-Interim President John Dramani Mahama by the Rawlings- and NDC-appointed Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, namely, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan.

The former University of Ghana political science lecturer would also inform the William Atuguba-presided panel of Supreme Court Judicators, in the Akufo-Addo, Bawumia and Obetsebi-Lamptey-led Presidential-Election Petition, that he had deliberately and personally supervised the illegal registration of hundreds of thousands of underage Ghanaian citizens. Then also, Ghanaians have not forgotten the strategically deliberate deep-sixing of the Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings-founded and led NDC-breakaway National Democratic Party (NDP), by the passionately and unabashedly pro-NDC partisan Dr. Afari-Gyan in the runup to the 2016 General Election, if memory serves the present writer accurately.

On the whole, author Osae-Kwapong, a fellow of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), offers his readers a compelling profile of the relative Golden Age of the Agyekum-Kufuor years in the crucial national development areas of education, healthcare, job creation, transportation, sanitation and the sticky issue of the uphill battle against official corruption. About the one forgivable weakness – actually quite a few – of Notes from the Public Square has to do with poor editing which, by the by, is easily compensated for by the acute readability of this well-researched and documented synopsis of the first 16 years of Ghana’s 32-year-old Fourth Republic. Another glaring flaw of the book is the near-total failure to adequately juxtapose the preceding Rawlings regime with the Agyekum-Kufuor tenure that immediately followed the former. It makes this study somewhat incomplete.

Then also, another weakness, albeit rather peripheral to this 240-page monograph, is the fact that the sponsor of this otherwise epistemically rewarding study is the passionately pro-Agyekum-Kufuor and New Patriotic Party-leaning Prof. Henry Kwasi Prempeh-headed Ghana Center for Democratic Development, although, here again, it is only the latter Accra-based policy think-tank that is widely known to have developed a scientifically credible mechanism for evaluating the performance of governments all over the African Continent called the Afrobarometer.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 26, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]