There Was an “Asante Project” before there Was an “Akyem Project” – Part 4

Part of the blame for the unarguably toxic shenanigans encapsulated in the “Restricted” Agyapadeε Document, whose publication continues to seismically rock the moral sensibilities of the nation, must be squarely placed at the doorstep of a volatile combination of the genuine frustration of the members of the Ofori-Panyin Clan, to be clearly distinguished from the rest of Okyeman, and what has been widely perceived throughout the country as the brazen and the cavalier display of both Asante Supremacy and Complacency at the same time. At least this is the basic thematic thread of the “Foreword” to the so-called "Agyapadeε” Document. We shall touch on the foregoing matter in due course.

For now, however, suffice it to observe in passing that nothing more strikingly reflects this widely perceived Asante Supremacist Sense of Birthright and Entitlement than the gross and morally intemperate personally shabby and morbidly narcissistic conduct of Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen, the “longest-playing” Trade and Industry and Presidential Special Initiatives Minister under the tenure of the latter’s cousin and former President, to wit, Mr. John “The Gentle Giant” (Kofi Diawuo) Agyekum-Kufuor. You see, throughout the period that Alan Cash, as Mr. Kyerematen is also popularly known, brashly and brazenly attempted to destroy the very institutional establishment of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), that is, if he could not be elected Presidential Candidate of the latter political establishment, his staunchest backer, namely, President Agyekum-Kufuor, and the Mpiani Faction of the party – in reality, the two are actually one and the same – did a diddly little to absolutely nothing to call their pet Presidential-Candidacy Steed to order.

We witnessed this weird chain of events in 2008 and, once again, early last year, when the self-styled Ethnic Fante from Asante-Edweso/Ejisu and Patasi, both in the vicinity of the Asante regional capital of Kumasi, resigned from the party and almost immediately proceeded to volley vitriolic torrents of personal abuse at both the person of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party, in which this Agyekum-Kufuor cousin had for nearly seven years served as the Trade and Industry Minister. No public statement of any kind seeking to assure the rank-and-file membership of the party by the former President and his former Chief-of-Staff and political and ideological Siamese Twin Brother had been issued to express their morally principled displeasure with the centrifugal attempts by a roundly and justly defeated Candidate Kyerematen to tear down the very fabric and architecture of the New Patriotic Party.

It has often been said that “Silence Is Golden.” In the latter instance, however, silence unarguably and inescapably appears to be toxically “Diamond” to the members of the Agyekum-Kufuor and the Mpiani Faction of the New Patriotic Party. The foregoing may be the kind of “Asante-Ethnic Complacency” that the author of the “Foreword” of the Agyapadeε Document, by the name of Ofori-Atta, talks about, even if one also hypothetically grants the imperious sense of vacuous grandeur and largely falsified history of “Exceptional Greatness” pontifically claimed by the author of the “Foreword” to the Agyapadeε Document. Truth be told, there is absolutely no way or no how that the “metonymical” symbolism of Kyebi can be claimed to be greater or culturally and politically superior to Asiakwa or The Sintim-Aboagyes – the very first modern jurists of both Okyeman and the Eastern Region (See the Appendix to Roger Gocking’s historical classic titled “Facing Two Ways”) – and the Okoampa-Agyeman Family and Clan. On the latter count also, we intend to eventually cross the bridge and the proverbial Birem and Supong rivers when we arrive at the same.

At any rate, what we want to highlight here and that which obviously evinces the strategic and the tactical heroism of the now lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, is the kind of veritable circus act that characterized the morbid jockeying to succeed a lame-duck President Agyekum-Kufuor in the leadup to the 2007 New Patriotic Party Presidential Primary, when a well-known staunch Agyekum-Kufuor backer, from the New Juaben enclave of the Eastern Region, even thought that he could purchase the party’s presidential candidacy ticket on the cheap, by simply donating a nondescript beehive of a mickey-mouse building which the donor hoped could be converted into some form of party hideout or a clubhouse in exchange for the delivery of the topmost ticket of the party in the runup to the 2008 Presidential Election.

Hopeson Adorye’s unwitting admission that the Presidential-Primary Contest organized by the leadership of the New Patriotic Party, in 2007, I suppose, was almost wholly composed of Ethnic Asantes, including the longest-serving Defense Minister in the government of President Agyekum-Kufuor, namely, the Oxbridge-educated and Forbes Magazine-Listed Billionaire Politician and the immediate younger brother of the proverbial “Gentle Giant,” to wit, Dr. Kwame Addo-Kufuor, ought to seriously and soberly inform any critically thinking and civically responsible Ghanaian citizen, that even college-educated Ethnic Asantes are still pathologically and intransigently afflicted or fixated with the morally and civically inexcusable cancer of Postcolonial Primitive, Monarchical and Feudalist Mindset to healthily ensure or guarantee the auspicious development of a civilized, modern democratic culture at the highest echelons of the New Patriotic Party’s leadership, let alone the lower rungs and echelons of the so-called Neoliberal and Market-Oriented Danquah-Busia-Dombo-inspired political and ideological establishment.

Furthermore, as Hopeson Adorye sanguinely and quaintly tells it, at least 70-percent of the Contenders for the 2024 Presidential Candidacy of the New Patriotic Party were of Ethnic Asante Lineage and Heritage, although the latter category of Akan Ethnicity or Subethnicity scarcely approximates 30-percent of the total population of Ghana. it thus became logically all-too-coherent and, perhaps, even morally necessary, if not decidedly inevitable, for a bold and fearless “Heroic Pioneer” like then-Candidate Akufo-Addo to break this jinx of Asante Monarchical Supremacist Grips on the topmost ticket of the party in order to free the New Patriotic Party from the civically and the politically regressive tentacles of the sort of cultural primitivism and pathology or neurosis represented by the clearly inordinate and politically comical vaulting ambition of such also-run presidential candidates as Messrs. Kyerematen and Kofi Konadu Apraku, for only two of the most obvious examples.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
July 31, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]