Is Oppong-Nkrumah Telling Us Something Slyly about the Akufo-Addo Presidency?

I have been casually and cursorily following the so-called Air Med Story or Saga for quite a little while now and find the former Deputy Education Minister, the Rev. John Ntim-Fordjuor, who has boldly and publicly alleged that there is a government-related, drug-trafficking connection involved, to be perfectly credible. And for the simple reason that the plaintiff or whistleblower is a bona fide Member of Parliament on a committee in our proverbial august House that readily affords the young man the kind of National Security Clearance to enable him to readily access information that may be inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens.

We need to also remember the fact that the leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has had a long-established and globally infamous association vis-a-vis the constitutionally criminal granting of asylum or haven to drug-trafficking lords and kingpins from the Colombia Drug Cartel, and the provision of these dangerous fugitives with native-born Ghanaian “Comfort Women” or demimondes to these internationally proscribed narcotic-contraband wholesalers and retailers since the inception of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, that is, going back as relatively far back as the two-term constitutionally legitimate tenure of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, Ghana’s longest-ruling and most extortionate postcolonial leader.

Back then, when the late former President Rawlings literally ruled the roost, characteristically, when it first came to light that virtually the entire leadership of the National Democratic Congress was in league with the Colombian and other Latin-American Drug Cartel Lords and Robber Barons, the very first line of defense of the criminal shenanigans of the key operatives of the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress, whose ragtag and faux-civilianized and popularly elected government was also headed by the late former President, was to vehemently deny the existence of any such criminal activities and, instead, fervidly seek to tarnish the hard-earned images and the reputations of those who attempted to legitimately and morally righteously expose them with a vengeance, in hopes of thoroughly stifling any public dissent, protest and disaffection for the state-capturing and the kleptocratic leadership of the National Democratic Congress.

Which is why it ought to come as absolutely no surprise, whatsoever, that an entire brigade of NDC propaganda goons would so viciously and nefariously pounce on him and ravenously attempt to silence and intimidate the whistleblower, to wit, the New Patriotic Party-sponsored Member of Parliament for Assin-South, in the Central Region, by craftily albeit not very sophisticatedly attempting to use the coercive apparatus of the National Intelligence Bureau (NIB) to effectively silence and intimidate the Rev-Mr. Ntim-Fordjuor and his associates among the ranks of the New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Minority Caucus.

In all this, however, what is even more telling, if also paradoxically so, is Mr. Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah’s rhetorically nuanced and pointedly double-edged defense of Mr. Felix Ofosu-Kwakye, the Minister for Government Communications. The spirited defense of the latter by the former Akufo-Addo-appointed Minister of Information, in the dubious name of “Brotherhood,” is a veritable double-edged sword because the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Ofoase-Atirebi Constituency, in Nana Akufo-Addo’s electoral stronghold of the Eastern Region, makes absolutely no studious attempt to critically examine the intricate details of the very forensically credible exposé by the Rev. Ntim-Fordjuor, except to obliquely and perhaps even ruefully recall the innumerable times when as the Akufo-Addo-appointed Deputy Information Minister and, subsequently, substantive Information Minister, he had been deviously and strategically misled into retailing information to the general Ghanaian public that later and/or shortly turned out to be patently false.

Personally, Yours Truly recalls one such conspicuously embarrassing moment when Mr. Oppong-Nkrumah smugly and cavalierly insisted, against the very indisputably obvious, that then Attorney-General and Justice Minister Gloria Akuffo, and the latter’s paternal aunt, then Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo, had absolutely no blood or consanguineal relationship with then President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, that is, the legitimately mandated Executive Chief-of-State who had appointed his fellow Akuffo clanswomen to their respective portfolios. I vividly recall the sort of inescapably inane genealogical acrobatics into which the Koforidua-born Mr. Oppong-Nkrumah had to put himself through, by almost literally somersaulting and landing on the very top of his head.

But, of course, even as Mr. Anane-Afoakwa, one of my old Anokyekrom fellow poets, wrote in one of his poems quite a while back, “If you climb up to the top/ of a mighty tree/ and land right back to Earth/ on your feet/ or even on top of your head/ you have successfully landed/ all the same.” You see, the good news here is that, and this was scandalously lost on some of the usual Mahama “Fanfools,” like some superannuated congenital chuckleheads that I know about who are resident somewhere in King Leopold’s Belgium, Mr. Oppong-Nkrumah was absolutely in no way vindicating the Mahama Presidency from the aforementioned and widely publicized Air-Med Scandal; rather, the former Minister for Water Resources, Works and Housing was simply and merely suggesting that Mr. Ofosu-Kwakye was “innocently” duty bound to “Sing His Master’s Voice.”

In other words, if the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament had proven himself to be a veritable and an epic liar, it was only primarily because the Abura-Asebu-Kwamankese legislator had been primed or prompted by his Jubilee House principals into doing just that and absolutely nothing else (See “Flight Saga: Kwakye Ofosu Isn’t a Liar, He Only Relayed What Was Given Him - Oppong Nkrumah” Ghanaweb.com 4/10/25). This is, of course, also precisely where Yours Truly draws the metaphorical line by taking vehement exception, and essentially on grounds that such a strategically morbid and lethargic attempt to exculpate the notorious hip-shooting British-trained Mahama communications surrogate, actually unwittingly puts the latter in conspicuously unflattering light of a figurative tabula rasa, that is, a virtual echo-chamber nincompoop, almost.

And all for the simple reason that it practically and rather unsavorily denudes Mr. Ofosu-Kwakye of the requisite moral and intellectual agency that may be unarguably envisaged to be the barest minimum requirement necessary for the assumption of such a politically sensitive portfolio. Mr. Oppong-Nkrumah, it goes without saying, had been able to far more creditably acquit himself as the Archbishop of Akyem-Abomosu-anointed Presidential Tout or Information Minister, fundamentally because the Ofoase-Ayirebi legislator has a law degree, in addition to his major practical experience in Mass Communications, and a specialty in Public Administration for good measure.

Which, of course, makes Mr. Ofosu-Kwakye seem to be scandalously, albeit characteristically, underqualified for the job. I mean, if the Air-Med aircraft from Gran Canaria - or the Spain-cannibalized Canary Islands, I suppose - had been officially scheduled to land in Luanda, the Angolan capital, according to the well-informed lights of Mr. Ofosu-Kwakye, after a three-day emergency stopover at the Kotoka International Airport, in Ghana’s capital of Accra, but instead inexplicably ended up somewhere back in Spain or one of the Spanish-controlled offshore African territories, then how and what do we call this? A Gospel Truth or The Decalogue? Come on, Kwame Gonja, spare me some chump change from the sale of your contraband loot!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 10, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]