As a personal victim of an enforced culture of tyranny and sycophancy by the erstwhile Agyekum-Kufuor Administration, I could only snort with utmost disgust and downright amused contempt to read the news report in which inveterate Akufo-Addo hater and political detractor and Chief-of-Staff of the Presidency of President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, namely, Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani, was reported to told the host of the “Good Morning Ghana” (GMG) current affairs television program, in an interview, that the recently outgone President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo created an unhealthy political culture and climate in the New Patriotic Party (NPP), that fostered sycophancy and sterile passivity on the part of the leadership of the latter institutional establishment (See “Everyone in NPP gov't became a sycophant—Kwadwo Mpiani” Modernghana.com 1/8/25).
Now, who has so soon and scandalously forgotten the strategically and morally crude attempt to use Messrs. Paul A. Afoko, Kwabena Agyepong and Sammy Crabbe, among a host of other Akufo-Addo detractors, by Messrs. Agyekum-Kufuor and Mpiani to brazenly and flagrantly sabotage the presidential ambitions of the twice, consecutively elected former President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo at the New Patriotic Party’s Kokomlemle-Accra National Headquarters? Who has also so soon and conveniently forgotten the set of politically calculated events and factors that precipitated the summary suspension and the scandalous removal of the late Mr. Harona/Haruna Esseku, then National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, by the Asante Mafia, in 2005 or thereabouts?
In the matter of Yours Truly’s own expulsion from the proverbial Elephant Party, hinted at right at the beginning of this very column, the subject was summarily expelled from both his membership of the Media Committee of NPP-USA - initially proposed as a possible chairperson of the latter committee - and from his general membership of the party by the extant National Chairman of the United States of America’s Chapter of the New Patriotic Party. And the sole and the overriding crime was that this author had dared to compose a highly charged or loaded political opinion piece, published on several Ghanaian media portals and in newspapers, that pointedly carped the decision by then President Agyekum-Kufuor to name immediate younger brother, to wit, Dr. Kwame Addo-Kufuor, a medical doctor and a pediatrician, if memory serves this author accurately, as Minister of Defense, instead of as Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor’s Health Minister, even as the late Lt-Gen. Joshua Mahamdu Hamidu, who had officially served as Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor’s National Security Adviser, while Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor was Ghana’s main opposition leader, was hurriedly dispatched from the country on a kind of “diplomatic assignment” that reeked far more of “good riddance” or “strategic distrust” than condign recompense for laudable yeomanly work.
As I vividly recall, a casual acquaintance had interjected in a conversation that I had struck up with another person that President Agyekum-Kufuor’s blatant exhibition of nepotism, by appointing his younger sibling as his Defense Minister, had the constructive purpose of shoring up his National Security Apparatus, as the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings had also done with his cousins and clansmen like the Tsikatas.
It therefore stood perfectly logical, in the opinion of the interjecting acquaintance, that jampacking his cabinet and the executive branch of his government with his Asante siblings, relatives and clansmen, as well as clanswomen, of course, was the most formidable means of deterring a forever-scheming and inimitably crafty former Chairman Rawlings from resorting to his old dirty tricks and gimmicks once more. No wonder, then, that throughout the first term of his tenure, our proverbial Gentle Giant kept incessantly warning the former junta leader against the cavalier presumption of him still being the active and the bona fide President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.
I quickly pointed out that neither were the institutional establishments of the New Patriotic Party nor the party-sponsored Presidency itself the bona fide property or heirloom of the family of any individual president or Fourth-Republican Ghanaian leader. The masterminds of my summary expulsion from the USA Chapter of the New Patriotic Party were Messrs. Kofi Boateng and Agyenim-Boateng, who at the time described himself as either a Deputy Attorney-General or “The” Deputy Attorney-General of the Southern State of Kentucky. Now, I know the foregoing for an incontrovertible fact because, as I have had numerous occasions to repeat the same ad-nauseam in previous columns, Mr. Boateng’s own Vice-Chairman, later National Chairman of NPP-USA, namely, Nana Agyei-Yeboah, would personally call this writer by phone a couple of days later to expressly dissociate himself from this midnight Asante Mafia decision taken to have Yours Truly summarily expelled from NPP-USA.
Here again, as I vividly recall, as well, Prof. Stephen Kwaku Asare - aka Kwaku Azar - was Chair of the NPP-USA Media Committee briefly. And so was Dr. Afua Sarkodie-Mensah, later to be seconded by President Akufo-Addo to represent Ghana at UNESCO - the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization - based in Paris, France. “Sister Afua,” as we affectionately call her, is much better known as the mother of the celebrated and globally renowned entertainment-wrestling star and champion Mr. Kofi Kingston. Incidentally, Sister Afua and Nana Agyei-Yeboah also happen to be companions and were unbeknownst to this author at the time, in fact, romantically involved. But I prefer to defer this glancing mention for a more appropriate and rhetorically relevant moment.
At any rate, what is most especially significant to highlight here is the fact that absolutely none of the members of the NPP-USA Media Committee, perhaps with the exception of Dr. Sarkodie-Mensah, who wistfully expressed her surprise about the apparently bizarre and unexplained expulsion of this writer from the aforementioned committee, put up what could be even remotely considered to be any remarkable or vehement protestation against Yours Truly’s summary expulsion from the USA-Chapter of the New Patriotic Party by the Asante Mafia. Which, of course, is absolutely not in any way suggestive of the fact that such remonstrance would have made a whit or a heck of any difference to Yours Truly one way or another.
You see, whatever measure of influence or impact that this writer may have had on Ghana’s political culture and the media landscape, by the way, was already firmly established well in advance before his very brief, 7-month membership affiliation with NPP-USA in 2007 or thereabouts. This author has always been his own person and sole agenda setter and motivator, with a vast pool of personal and professional role models, largely remote, scattered all over the world. He also did not in the least bit expect Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani to highlight the fact that it was the immitigably extortionate and the tyrannical culture of enforced servility and obeisance of the Agyekum-Kufuor regime that got the otherwise highly talented and competent, albeit lightning rod, likes of Mr. Yaw Osafo-Maafo and Mr. Felix Owusu-Agyepong summarily expelled from the cabinet of the very first New Patriotic Party-sponsored government in Fourth-Republican Ghana.
The Agyekum-Kufuor Chief-of-Staff and lock-step or goose-stepping partner in the enforced culture of rancid sycophancy by the Asante Mafia has himself publicly explained the unspeakable extent of the implacable animus that has been invested in the systematic and the relentless attempt to ensure that Nana Akufo-Addo never acceded to the Presidency of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana in our lifetime. So, it is absolutely unnecessary for this writer to rehash the same here, once again.
If anything at all, it is former President Akufo-Addo who has foolhardily, for whatever it may be worth, bent over backwards and then some, as New Yorkers are wont to say, to perennially and/or perpetually ingratiate himself with the Agyekum-Kufuor and the Kwadwo Mpiani Faction of the New Patriotic Party. The institutional establishment of the proverbial Elephant Party needs a far more progressive and visionary way forward, if it is to make any meaningful and politically worthwhile difference in the socioeconomic existence of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry. The party needs a clean break from the infantile and the jejune and unremittingly dirty and morally vile shenanigans of its hawkish and mutually destructive octogenarians and septuagenarians. Time to effectively and permanently retire these political deadwoods from our geopolitical landscape, as they are often called in academia.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
February 1, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]