What Was Akufo-Addo’s Aborted December 19th MMDCEs Referendum About, Mr. Nartey Yeboah?

Had the Second Vice-Chairman of the Greater-Accra Regional Chapter of the country’s presently main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) been paying studious attention to the Presidency of the recently retired Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, he would have realized that among all the five leaders who have held the democratic reins of governance in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, at least thus far, it was only the twice consecutively elected former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice and, subsequently, Minister of Foreign Affairs and ECOWAS Integration, under the two-term tenure of President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, who made any serious attempt to functionally and significantly “deepen” or enhance Ghana’s fiercely fought democratic culture.

Which is why it can only come as rather unfortunate, at best, to hear Mr. Eric Nartey Yeboah so slanderously and intemperately accuse Nana Akufo-Addo of running what has sneeringly come to be dubbed as “a family and friends government,” almost as if the critic conveniently and expediently is hoping that party members and stalwarts have so soon forgotten that the tenure of the pathologically “Asantefied” government of the former Deputy Parliamentary Minority Leader of the late Mr. Victor Owusu-led Popular-Front Party (PFP), during the Dr. Hilla “Babini” Limann-led Third Republic, had been unprecedentedly chock-full of the blood relatives and the close associates of Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor in the most powerful cabinet portfolios, including those of Ministers of Defense and National Security, to name only a couple that readily comes to mind (See “ Akufo-Addo's centralized power caused NPP's 2024 defeat - NPP Second Vice Chairman” Modernghana.com 4/2/25).

Indeed, there was even a time when an Agyekum-Kufuor sibling held the two most sensitive cabinet portfolios of Ministers of Defense and the Interior, almost as if absolutely no party stalwarts could be trusted or deemed qualified to hold either one of these two most highly sensitive cardinal ministerial or cabinet portfolios. So, why has Mr. Nartey Yeboah conveniently ignored to equally highlight the fact that it was, in fact, the official-corruption serenading President Agyekum-Kufuor who actually set the “family and friends” governance precedence, thereby making such unsavory and an unethical praxis shamelessly comfortable for the putative Archbishop of Akyem-Abomosu to studiously follow suit without any qualms whatsoever?

Then also, isn’t it an open secret and one that has been obvious to almost all party stalwarts and well-meaning members, supporters and sympathizers that during the two consecutive tenures at the Presidency of Nana Akufo-Addo, the Agyekum-Kufuor and the Kwadwo Mpiani and the Kyerematen Faction of the New Patriotic Party had vigorously and literally worked around the clock to ensure the massive and the epic failure of the Akufo-Addo Presidency, even while also cunningly and deviously - in the words of the erstwhile British Colonial Administrators - pretending as if they had both the interests of the party and the Ghanaian citizenry at large at heart?

Else, how and why would a party renegade and an implacable detractor like a royally and an epically failed Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen so publicly and contemptuously castigate Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor for having obviously crossed party “factional” lines and “Asante Tribal Bonds” to publicly and heartily endorse the Asante-Mafia designated “Outsider” and the 2024 Presidential Candidacy of then Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, whose 2024 Presidential Running-Mate, by the way, was none other than Dr. Matthew (Yaw) Opoku-Prempeh - aka NAPO - a veritable scion and nephew or grand-nephew of former President Agyekum-Kufuor?

At any rate, what needs to be highlighted here, more than anything else, and that which makes the democratic credentials of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo stand well over and above those of his four predecessors and, now, the immediate predecessor who has also become his immediate successor, to wit, President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, is Nana Akufo-Addo’s historic tabling of the December 19, 2019 Referendum that would have ensured the direct election of all Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executive Officers (MMDCEs) throughout the country, in order to make these hitherto handpicked government appointees more administratively and professionally accountable to the people whose affairs they had been duly and solemnly sworn to jealously protect and promote.

One would have thought that the proposed and summarily aborted December 19th 2019 Referendum would have been met with a whirlwind of cross-partisan support throughout the country. But what did all well-meaning and progressive-minded Ghanaian citizens witness, but a massive groundswell of vehement cross-partisan protests across the entire length and breadth of the country, deliberately and brazenly led by some key operatives of the Asante Federation?

Not surprisingly, some of the most powerful and the most influential leaders of the Asante Federation have also regressively decided to go to war against the Akufo-Addo-implemented Universally Fee-Free Senior High, STEM, Technical and Vocational System, on grounds of such perfectly normative functional infelicities as inadequate accommodation and provender or alimentary resources, while seeing absolutely nothing wrong with the equally functionally inadequate administration of the Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

We know where these obdurately self-willed nation-wrecking reprobates come from, because we were once one and the same with them, except that some of us awoke to the light of Modern Civilization a generation or two before these half-diapered and self-deluded, snot-choked toddler kinsmen and women of ours. You see, my maternal grandfather, The Rev. T. H. Sintim (Yawbe Akosa) Aboagye (1896-1982), Beloved Nephew of Odeefuor Nana Amaniampong, I, of Asante-Mampong, and the doted upon first-born son Nana Akosua Baaduaa, of Akyem-Begoro and Asante-Mampong Bretuo Clans, worked diligently and thanklessly among them for decades and nearly lost his life in the process as the very first Asante-descended Akyem Kwaa to have been heretically and sacrilegiously named Principal/Headteacher of the Adum Presbyterian Primary School in 1932.

Trust me, Dear Reader, “It Is Morning Yet on Creation Day,” as the title of a brilliant collection of essays authored by the globally celebrated and immortalized Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, has it.

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