A Good One There, Daniel Dugan!

I read Hon. Daniel Dugan’s article captioned “48 Steps Apart: Agama & Afede (1),” and could barely contain my expectation for part 2 or the next installment in what the author promises to be a series of exposés (Ghanaian Chronicle / Modernghana.com 9/5/18). If I recall accurately, this is not the first time that I am reading a very instructive piece from Mr. Dugan. The last article that I read written by this quite erudite gentleman intellectual, and maybe even a scholar, highlighted Nkrumah’s dastardly attempts to irreparably humiliate Okyeman, in particular the good and nimble people of Akyem-Abuakwa, by handpicking a fellow native Nzema of the late dictator to represent Abuakwaians in Parliament without absolutely any regard for the inalienable democratic and human rights of this most significant Akan sub-ethnic nationality. For days, I couldn’t hold any remarkable quantities of victuals in my stomach. That was how excruciatingly sick I felt.

In “48 Steps Apart: Agama & Afede (1),” Mr. Dugan has, once again, instructively and constructively exposed the patently cynical agitprop mendacity, largely propagated by some Left-leaning Nkrumaist Ghanaians, that became known as the Apollo 568 Scandal, in which some political appointees of the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), so-called, regime were swiftly and legitimately fired from the civil and public service fundamentally because the rules of merit and fairness and equal employment opportunities for all Ghanaians had been deliberately and flagrantly violated. The overwhelming majority of the targeted employees had been invidiously hired on the basis of ethnicity and party affiliation, rather than on proven merit or accomplishments. I was especially impressed by the author’s eloquent and meticulous, if also inimitably systematic, exposé on the fact that Anlo-Ewes, and the Ewe ethnic group, in general, had been glaringly overrepresented in our national security agencies, in particular the police service, which convincingly explains why out of the 131 police officers fired by the Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia-led Progress Party (PP) government – the author actually uses the more diplomatic and euphemistic terminology of “disengaged – 53 were of Ewe descent, while a significant 36 were of Asante/Akan descent and a diddly 6 of Ga-Adangbe extraction, as it were.

But the part of his article that I was most riveted by was that portion that poignantly dealt with what Mr. Dugan termed as the abject hypocrisy of the late Dr. G. K. Agama, the extant leader of the main parliamentary opposition National Alliance of Liberals (NAL) – read National Alliance of Anlo-Ewes or Trokosi Nationalists – in the infamous matter of the alleged description of Ewes by the late Mr. Victor Owusu as “an inward-looking people.” The latter admittedly pejorative invective was afforded striking validity by Togbe Afede, of the Asogli Traditional Area, of the Volta Region, recently, when having virulently maligned the integrity and hard-earned image and reputation of the National Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), the Yale University-educated Asogli Chieftain curiously demanded an unreserved written public apology from the very target of his unprovoked vitriol, when Mr. Freddy Blay made the unimpeachably prompt and very wise decision of retributively impugning the psychological soundness of Togbe Afede.

In the wake of the preceding developments, it is quite obvious that the last legitimately invested traditional ruler who ought to have been voted President of the Ghana National House of Chiefs is this seemingly pathologically self-absorbed Asogli Paramount Chief. The man is passionately partisan to a fault to the extent that he even once served on the Presidential Transition Team of the Mills-Mahama government. I was also enthused by Mr. Dugan’s momentously and very timely exposure or highlighting of the rarely mentioned fact that the late Mr. Victor Owusu, leader of the Popular-Front Party (PFP), was long a firebrand Nkrumaist before he opportunistically and conveniently crossed over into the Danquah-Busia-Dombo liberal and free-market and democratically oriented camp. And on the latter count, it cannot be gainsaid that it is about time the rabidly anti-Akufo-Addo faction among the ranks of the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party was made to look into the blotchy political mirror of their past and that of their patriarch, the man whose own self-crafted failure to clinch the Presidency, in 1979, has been caustically used and continues to be unconscionably used as a cudgel to gratuitously lambaste the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Kudos to Mr. Dugan. I am eagerly and studiously awaiting your next installment. And I am quite certain that I am not alone on such expectation. And, of course, there is every reason to hope and believe that your next installment will be even more instructive than your first. God Bless Us All!

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
September 6, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]