14 Years On: Memory Of President John Evans Atta-Mills Lives Strongly In My Heart Without My Presence @ Asomdwe Park

Today, Tuesday, July 21, 2026, would have marked the 82^nd birthday of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, were he still orbiting the earth realm.

Incidentally, July 24, 2012, the day on which he passed on to glory, was also a Tuesday.

Friday, July 24, 2026, will be exactly 14 years since the late President left us to be with the Lord.

14 years already? Time, indeed, flies!
There is a particular kind of silence that visits me every July. It does not announce itself with thunder or drama. It simply arrives – the way grief does when it has lived with you long enough to know your address by heart.

Fourteen years and fourteen times, the calendar has turned this same corner and found me still standing here, still carrying a name, still carrying a memory, still carrying a mission that refuses to let go of me even when I have finally taken a bold decision not to allow my heart to be buried in Asomdwe Park.

It was last year; precisely January 7, 2025, that I took the decision not set foot at Asomdwe Park again for as long as it is necessary for me to stay away from the place. I took the decision when on that day, the bust of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills was vandalised and desecrated only because it had the name of President Akufo-Addo and the name of Samuel Koku Anyidoho on it.

President Akufo-Addo was the President who got the Asomdwe Park constructed and under the auspices of the Atta-Mills Institute (now MILLS Institute), Samuel Koku Anyidoho was the one who pleaded with President Akufo-Addo to construct Asomdwe Park.

This year, July 24, marking the fourteenth anniversary of the painful passing to glory of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, I, Samuel Koku Sitsofe Anyidoho, remain very much resolved to continue to stay away from Asomdwe Park.

Certainly, it is not anger that keeps me away; it is not fatigue that keeps me away – though God knows I have earned the right to be tired.

It is something closer to peace, that is keeping me away from Asomdwe Park – type of peace that comes only after a long, exhausting labour has finally delivered, and the child, however contested, however fought over, is alive and standing on its own.

The Man He Was Before the Monument.
Before Asomdwe Park was a place, President John Evans Atta-Mills was person – a teacher first, in the truest sense of the word. He taught tax law at various levels long before he ever occupied the Castle and sat on the highest Seat of the Land. The teacher that he was, even after the trappings of high office surrounded him, he never stopped being a human being who wanted to explain every decision patiently, to bring people along (not force them along), to ensure collective movement in the right direction.

As a very close associate, I remember a man of quiet humour, deep personal faith, a stubborn decency that sometimes frustrated even his own strategists because he refused to abandon it for any form of fleeting petty partisan and parochial political convenience.

On that fateful day, Tuesday, July 24, 2012, President Atta-Mills became the first President of Ghana to pass-on while in active service. In other words, he passed-on as the sitting President of the Republic of Ghana.

The fact that he was the first ever President to pass-on while in active service, should have been enough reason to guarantee him a settled and dignified place in the memory of the nation – the kind of unanimous, uncomplicated reverence that a nation owes to a Leader taken from post in the very painful manner in which it happened.

Instead, what followed his painful exit from the realm of earth was a battle. Not a battle over whether he mattered – that was never truly in doubt among the ordinary Ghanaians who loved him and queued in endless stretches for three days just to catch a glimpse of his mortal remains as it laid in state at the State House.

The battle was between those who never wanted his memory kept alive and those of us who vowed so to do – even if our heads were going to be cut off!

I found myself, without ever fully choosing it, standing in the thick of that battle.

As it stands, the nation still does not know the cause of death since no autopsy report was ever made public. A President passed on in office and 14 years down the line the nation does not still know the cause of death? And we think that we must be proud of such a dark record? Hmmmmm!!!!

Carrying a Flame Others Wanted Extinguished

I will not pretend that the battle was an easy one; there was absolutely NOTHING easy about it.

Of all the resistance in trying to keep President Mills’ legacy alive (and there was resistance from many quarters – political and otherwise), none wounded more than that which came from persons closely related to the late President by blood.

It is one thing to be opposed by strangers, by rivals, by people who never knew the man and what he meant to some of us and so could not understand the sacred duty/burden that we bore to ensure that he was given a befitting lasting place of eternal rest.

It is another thing entirely to be opposed via acidic vitriol publicly by the two younger brothers of the late President. Of course, they succeeded in applying pressure and roping-in the late President’s son – the real catalyst that made me take the decision to change “Atta-Mills Institute” into “MILLS Institute”.

I chose to drop the name and rather go for the values that would best allow me to keep the memory of the late President alive without all the silly attacks from people who did nothing to get Asomdwe Park built yet turn around to attack me for doing so.

I do not say these things to reopen only wounds or to drag these matters in the public space for no apparent reason: I say it because it is the truth of the journey and what it has cost me and the matters are already matters of public knowledge/record.

No hurt, no pain, no bitterness, but facts are facts – no one can pretend that the matters at hand did not happen.

There were moments – many of them – when the attacks from that direction were the most nauseating of all, precisely because they came from where unity and understanding should have thrived because of my genuine altruistic desire to just allow them to lead the way till I realized that there was no such desire so I took the bull by the horn and did what I had to do.

It was a peculiar loneliness to be fighting to keep a good man’s memory alive while being attacked by his brothers and son who suddenly are treating you like an intruder/imposter when they know the strong magnetic bond that existed between you and their late brother/father when he was alive.

Of course, the magnetic bond itself could have been a great source of envy.

Yet, I braved the odds and stayed on course. I stayed because I did not do the work for applause, and I certainly did not do it to be thanked by everyone. I stayed because I believed – and still believe – that a country which allows its leaders’ memories to be erased, contested into silence, or consciously left to rot in the corners of ungrateful political convenience, is a country that teaches its future leaders a very dangerous lesson: that service is disposable, that sacrifice is forgettable, that death in office earns you nothing but a fading photograph. In essence, the nation is not worth dying for!

The Birth of Asomdwe Park
When I made the case, when I pressed and pleaded and at times actually begged for a befitting resting place worthy of the first ever President who passed on in the saddle of national service, I did not do so as a matter of personal ambition. God forbid!!! I did so because I could not bear the thought of President Atta-Mills being tucked away without permanence – a place where school children can visit 50 years down the line and still hear the story as if it was unfolding before their very eyes.

As is already publicly documented, I begged President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to build Asomdwe Park and I make no apology for that appeal, and I once again extend to him, without any reservation, the credit he is due.

Whatever our political differences (I was detained for more than 48 hours for supposedly plotting a coup to overthrow his government), when I made the appeal, he did not refuse.

Indeed, he could have decided to be very petty and ignore the appeal because of infantile partisan considerations, but he did not.

Indeed, if I were also a small-minded and tunnel-visioned person, I would have allowed my detention for no apparent reason, to becloud my judgement and so I would have resented President Akufo-Addo to the point that when the opportunity arose for me to plead for the construction of Asomdwe Park, I would have let it slip by.

Between President Akufo-Addo and myself, we both chose to rise above petty partisan politics and look at the bigger picture of ensuring that the heavy disgrace that was sitting on the image of Ghana for allowing the burial place of the late President to sink in ruin and humiliation, was removed.

As the President of the Republic, he looked at the bigger national interest picture and decided to honour a fallen President with the permanence he deserved. He did not only build it; he was personally present with Vice President Bawumia to commission the Park.

Ayekoo to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Why I Am Stepping Back
Fourteen years is not a short time to carry a torch, especially one that others have been trying to snatch or dim.

I have marched, I have written, I have spoken – costing me friendship and some amount of political capital – but in the fullness of time, God shall restore what the locusts and the canker worms have eaten.

I have defended the honour of a man who has departed, with pride and dignity and with no iota of regrets but there comes a time when a mission is completed, you move on to other missions.

To those who fought me over Asomdwe Park, who contested every step, who said I had gone to dig up the remains for the former President for rituals, who concocted all manner of lies just to score cheap political points, I say to them; “I have left Asomdwe Park for you so you can go and do whatever you want to do there”.

Never again will they have the joy of telling lies about me because of Asomdwe Park. Indeed, I never owned nor had custody of Asomdwe Park so they can have it.

There is a huge difference between abandoning a legacy and simply setting down a particular burden once its purpose has been fulfilled. I am doing the latter. My mission of building Asomdwe Park is finished and I have nothing else to do than to thank God for His abundant grace and mercies.

Let Asomdwe Park represent the peace it was created for.

He Remains in My Heart.
My absence from Asomdwe Park for some time to come, rather allows my heart more personal space to accommodate the memory of the late President.

For a fact, President John Evans Atta-Mills does not live in a park - he never did. He always lives in the quiet dignity of a man who governed without theatrics. He lives in the memory of every ordinary Ghanaian who felt, however briefly, that they had a President who exhibited lots of empathy in his leadership. He lives in the everlasting tax laws he introduced and the many students he taught with such patient care. He lives in the moral seriousness he brought to the job as President of the Republic of Ghana – the job that easily corrupts lesser men.

Most of all, he lives in my heart – in a place no family dispute, no political rival, and no absence from physical location can ever reach or diminish.

Fourteen years on, I am no longer the man fighting to build a monument. I am simply a man who kept a promise to honour the memory of my political father, and a promise kept does not need my presence at Asomdwe Park to prove that it is real.

I am very much focused on the, MILLS (Mindset, Integrity, Loyalty, Leadership, Service) Institute, and I have peaceful joy in my heart that I own the values that the late President stood for and it would take only an extremely mentally disturbed person to come question why I have chosen to uphold such values.

So, do you now get the full picture of why I do not need to be at Asomdwe Park to do what God has purposed for me to do to keep the memory of the late President alive as I now transcend onto a higher pedestal of being a Nation Builder?

Indeed, my greatest joy and blessings come from constantly meeting people I have never met before at various places (barbering shops, petrol filling stations, markets, shops, in traffic, public events, etc.,), and they saying to me, “Koku, you are a personification of loyalty; God bless you for your loyalty to President Atta-Mills; Koku, I admire you for what you stand for; Koku your integrity is very amazing …”. As far as I know, the voice of the people is the voice of God.

No matter how long it takes, I know that at God’s own appointed time Mother Ghana shall duly honour me for my loyalty to God and Country and when that time comes, NO man born of flesh can STOP it! “For the vision is for an appointed time; But at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; Because it will surely come, it will not tarry” (Habakuk 2:3).

President John Evans Atta-Mills, sir, may your good soul continue to be at peace in the bosom of the Lord. You loved me, and I loved you too, sir. When the trumpet sounds, we shall surely meet again in the new Jerusalem where there shall be no weeping and gnashing of teeth. Amen.

Shalom.
Samuel Koku Sitsofe Anyidoho
Founder & CEO, MILLS Institute for Public Policy Advocacy and Transformational Leadership Development.

Email: Sitsoanyidoho1@yahoo.com

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