Kennedy Agyapong Should Join Team Akufo-Addo And Cut Back On His Tantrums

As I have observed over and over again, he is one of the positive reminders of the legion promises that Team Akufo-Addo made to the Ghanaian electorate in the lead-up to Election 2016. But what makes him even more admirable to keen observers of our national political culture is the fact that the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Assin-Central is a maverick politician who, for the most part, calls the shots as he envisages the same.

Even so, sometimes Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong appears to be too earnest in his zeal to ensuring that Team Akufo-Addo fulfills at least the most salient of its electioneering campaign promises in a timely fashion (See “Ken Agyapong Losing Hope in Bawumia” TheHeraldGhana.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/17/17).

The fact of the matter, though, is that 5 months is scarcely enough for anybody or a team of technocrats to comprehensively troubleshoot the apocalyptic mess bequeathed the nation and Team Akufo-Addo by the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), let alone devise some of the most effective and constructive means of dealing with the same. It is also important for the hip-shooting (tongue-in-cheek) critic to appreciate the inescapable fact that as a Member of Parliament, Mr. Agyapong is equally responsible for helping the ruling party, of which he is a key operative, find the requisite solutions for some of the problems requiring prompt attention and head-on strategic solutions, such as the creation of genuine and temporally sustainable employment opportunities for the teeming members of our able-bodied but woefully underemployed and unemployed youths.

As a very successful businessman himself, by all accounts, Mr. Agyapong has absolutely no excuse or reason to expect Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia alone to strategize for the immediate creation of massive employment opportunities for our youths, nearly half of whom are effectively without any viable means of making a living at the last count. Not accepting a cabinet portfolio in the Akufo-Addo Administration does not in any way exonerate the career businessman of the same responsibilities as Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia and all the other key appointees of these two politically and ideologically tenacious leaders. For instance, Mr. Agyapong could become part or a member of a technical team focused on the creation of jobs and meaningful and constructive job programs for our youths.

Indeed, even as Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, whose husband created the main opposition National Democratic Congress and is the founding-mother of the NDC-breakaway National Democratic Party (NDP) candidly observed recently, it takes far longer than just 5 months to devise effective solutions for problems created over the course of nearly a decade. Nana Konadu must know precisely what she is talking about – for it was she and her husband who singularly created what Chairman Jerry John Rawlings has bitterly and pointedly described as the most corrupt and thievish cabal of politicians on the Fourth-Republican Ghanaian political landscape.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 19, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]