What Akosua Manu Needs to Understand about Vice-President Naana Opoku-Agyemang

I read the news story about Ms. Akosua Asaa Manu, the 2024 New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Candidate for Adentan Constituency, in the Greater-Accra Region, and the subject of this column’s letter petitioning Vice-President Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang to intervene in the deliberately calculated and seismically scandalous humiliation of “Suspended” Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo, and could not help but disconsolately feel pity for the very naive petitioner. No wonder that our dear sister fared miserably in the aforementioned parliamentary election (See “Tell Mahama to cease the violation of CJ Torkonoo's rights — Akosua Manu to Veep” Modernghana.com 6/11/25).

If, indeed, the petitioner is unreservedly convinced that President “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama is either violating or has flagrantly violated the inalienable human and the civil rights of the Chief Justice of the august Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG), then it obviously goes without saying that it is a legitimately constituted court of law to which the petitioner ought to be suing for the prompt redressing of such flagrant and egregious violation, and not to the discretionary sympathy of a gender-designated female or woman who has unarguably proven herself to be absolutely nothing short of a brazen and an unspeakably cynical political opportunist.

After all, did the former Mahama-appointed Education Minister not fully and unreservedly throw her weight behind the Mahama and the National Democratic Congress-sponsored infamous Montie Trio who launched a barbarous media-campaign blitz against Retired Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood, in a coldly calculated bid to forcing the first woman and Ghana’s longest-serving Apex Court President to resign the post at which she performed with emulative competence that could not be said of both the overwhelming majority of her predecessors and arguably each and every one of her successors?

As I vividly recall, nearly each and every major female cabinet appointee of the first Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) lined up their support behind the Montie Trio of Media Propaganda Thugs who had publicly sworn, with the barely veiled complicity of the Mahama Jubilee House, to have then Chief Justice Wood sexually violated, while all her other Non-NDC-appointed Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of Ghana got literally dismembered on behalf of the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse. Among the staunch backers of the Montie Trio Media Terrorists were Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu, the widely alleged “Mistress-Mind” behind the Alfred Agbesi Woyome Mega-Heist; Nana Oye Lithur and Mrs. Elizabeth Ofosu-Agyare, to name only a handful.

Now, the first and the greatest weakness of Ms. Manu’s petition to Vice-President Naana Opoku-Agyemang is the rather lame, to speak much less about the downright farcical presumption that, somehow, a cutthroat dyed-in-the-wool NDC politician like the first female Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast dances to the “cacophonous” tune of the Global Women’s Liberation Movement. No such curious presumption could be more egregious and grossly mistaken. The fact and the truth of the matter is that Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang is a brash and a brazen opportunist who looks up to and for nothing short of her own personal and individual interests and those of her close associates and cronies and her family members and relatives.

Which is why Yours Truly was not in the least bit surprised that the University of Cape Coast and York, Canada, alumna would both edit and write the “Preface” to Prof. Kwamena Ahwoi’s hatchet job of a memoir or “Kiss-and-Tell” literary ambush titled “Working with Rawlings” (Nielsen, 2020). In her rather desultory and palpably jittery “Preface” to the book which Martin ABK Amidu, Ghana’s longest-serving Deputy Attorney-General and Deputy Minister of Justice, bitterly described as a masterful exercise in betrayal and launched a brief running battle with the author, Naana Opoku-Agyemang characterized Prof. Ahwoi’s traducement of the globally acclaimed Founding-Father of the presently ruling National Democratic Congress as the secular equivalent of the “Gospel Truth” of what essentially transpired during the two decades that the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings served as both Ghana’s de-facto strongman and the country’s first democratically elected Fourth-Republican leader.

You see, contrary to what Ms. Akosua Asaa Manu appears to have lamely and facilely convinced herself to believe is the innate beneficence of Vice-President Naa Opoku-Agyemang, the sad and tragic reality and the painful truth about the Elmina native, from the Central Region, is that both Naana Opoku-Agyemang and President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama are internal party turncoats completely bereft of remorse and sympathy for anybody else, except for themselves and their ideological associates, cronies and relatives. Not surprisingly, shortly after the release of the Kwamena Ahwoi anti-Rawlings ambush, both Candidates Mahama and Opoku-Agyemang would make a beeline to the private residence of the Rawlingses, shamelessly and unconscionably seeking the blessing of the party’s founding patriarch.

Even more telling, as the Mahama-appointed Education Minister, Naana Opoku-Agyemang summarily abrogated the age-old Teacher-Trainee Allowance of which she and the estranged/divorced husband and father of her three well-educated adult children had been prime beneficiaries as teacher trainees at the University of Cape Coast. You see, the problem with obviously novice and wet-eared politicians like Akosua Asaa Manu and, to be certain, a critical mass of the leadership of the New Patriotic Party, is to naively suppose that they could logically reason with their hard-nosed and narcissistic counterparts among the vanguard ranks of the National Democratic Congress on matters of justice and fair play.

You see, for corporate sharks and piranhas like the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse, realpolitik is immutably a zero-sum game, in which not only does the winner take all, even more significantly, the winner also ensures that his/her most formidable competitors and rivals are thoroughly vanquished in the process.

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