The Problem Is Not Napo’s Royal Background but His Mahama-like Ministerial Incompetence

I have promised myself and some relatives who immensely matter to me that I am hellbent on not committing the strategically suicidal blunder of scoring “an own goal” against the relatively far more progressive ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and heretically in favor of the kleptocratic and the kleptomaniacal leadership of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC). Unfortunately, it has become very obvious to me for almost the entire period that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has been at the helm of our national affairs, that perhaps some ironically wicked plan had been hatched and/or rigged up to ensure that Dr. Matthew Yaw Opoku-Prempeh, widely known to be the nephew – he recently said that he is, in fact, the grandnephew of the putative “Gentle Giant,” if memory serves Yours Truly accurately – of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, would never become a major force on Ghana’s political terrain to reckon with.

But it has not been for quite the same legitimate concerns that were recently raised by Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jr., Editor-Publisher of the so-called Insight newspaper (See “It's a shame, disgusting to use his Asante royal as qualification for running mate —'Angry' Kwesi Pratt reacts to NAPO's nomination ” Modernghana.com 7/6/24). Not in quite the same vein or manner as the Agona-Nsabaa native who often mischievously pretends as if he is not aware of the readily accessible and unarguable historical fact that each and every one of Ghana’s postcolonial rulers, including our junta or military rulers, with the possible exception of a couple of them, have been of royal lineage, although Dr. Opoku-Prempeh and former President Agyekum-Kufuor, who is widely alleged to have raised the 2024 Mahamudu Bawumia Presidential Running Mate, may be regarded as hailing from the most unarguably significant royal clan or family in our time.

But what I am really attempting to latch onto here is that the medically trained doctor and graduate of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, does not appear to have been appointed to ministerial or cabinet portfolios in which he could have easily excelled and thus significantly reduced any quite reasonable grounds for any ardent or inveterate critic, such as Mr. Pratt, to doubt the likelihood of the nomination of the former Education Minister as the best qualified candidate among the half-dozen, or so, pool of candidates whose names had earlier on been floated among the higher echelons of party leadership as possible Running-Mate Nominees to partner Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia into the landmark and the watershed 2024 Presidential Election.

I have often wondered whether subjected to the practically relevant quiz or a Vice-Presidential Debate with Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, the Teacher-Trainee-Allowance-Extorting Mahama-appointed former Education Minister, NAPO, as Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh is also popularly known, would be to hold his own or be able to creditably acquit himself by informing Ghanaian citizens and voters on even a couple of some of the most basic theories of education upon which his stewardship of the Ministry of Education was based. I have said this before and hereby reiterate the same herein, once more, that how come that when we are looking for a ministerial candidate to manage the portfolio of Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, we do not look for a Sociologist or an English Professor but, somehow, when we are looking for a Minister of Education, we indiscriminately settle for just about any nondescript college-educated candidate? We do pretty much the same when it comes to the selection and the appointment of the Minister of Health.

Is there any wonder, therefore, that the quality of our education system, until very recently, left much to be desired? Now, “YeboaaAkua’s” son can fool himself into believing that, somehow, between 2017 and 2021, it was Dr. Opoku-Prempeh who was really running the Ministry of Education, but those of us professionally trained in the discipline of Education and Pedagogy cannot be so easily fooled about the question of who really ran the Ministry of Education from 2017 through the first week of January 2025. I personally fiercely fought on behalf of Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum in these very pages and in this very column to be duly and fully afforded his pride of place by getting named as the substantive Education Minister. And I sincerely do not see the scandalously underappreciated Jachie-Pramso and Bosomtwe Constituency native wasting his darn precious time in his present thankless portfolio well past the end of the present New Patriotic Party government.

There is something rather bizarre about a medically trained doctor and graduate of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, whose first major entrepreneurial and industrial commitment was as the Chief Executive Officer of a Security Services Company. Whom we are, all of a sudden, being told is best qualified to partner with a complete party and a political “Outsider” into the landmark and the watershed 2024 Presidential Election. “YeboaaAkuaba,” Oyiwa!!!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
July 7, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]