Togbe Afede Should Spare Us His Abject Hypocrisy

I don’t know why The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, permitted the warmongering and reputation-soiling Paramount Chief of the Asogli Traditional Area, of the Volta Region, to take his trademark streak of insufferable arrogance and pomposity to the heart of the Great Asante Federation and citadel of Akan Culture. Not that it is any of my business; just that it boggles the progressive and creative imagination quite a bit. Indeed, just a couple of weeks ago, some Togbe by the name of Hekli Adzi Howusu, if memory serves me accurately, stood somewhere in the southern part of the Volta Region and at a press conference reportedly promised to rain torrents of hell on the entire nation, if the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) dared to carve the proposed Oti Region out of the present-day Volta Region. Togbe Howusu claimed to be the War Commander of some sovereign geopolitical enclave called the Asogli Nation or Kingdom.

Now, we have “Commander” Howusu’s boss telling us that, all of a sudden, a skyrocketing politics of insults has taken grips of our national discourse (See “Growing Politics of Insults Worrying – Togbe Afede” Graphic.com.gh / Ghanaweb.com 10/13/18). This is also the very personality who mounted the media podium and called Mr. Freddie Blay a political scam-artist and a robber-baron who needed to be investigated for theft, because the National Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party had dared to use his business skills and acumen to create jobs for some of the party’s stalwarts by purchasing some 300 minibuses to be used as commercial means of transport. Now the alleged majority shareholder of Accra Hearts of Oak says that he was quoted out of context, but he has yet to tell the rest of the nation precisely what he had said about Mr. Blay, who is also publisher-proprietor of the Daily Guide newspaper.

His are inexcusably hypocritical observations because the sort of politics of insults and personal abuse and character assassination that Togbe Afede is referring to was actually singularly invented by his own “revolutionary” kinsman and clansman, to wit, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings who, by the way, also happens to be the founder and patriarch of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC). He may, indeed, have been outside the country at the time, but there was a time when other than showering then-Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings with blind and thoughtless encomiums, the President of the Ghana National House of Chiefs would not have dared to make any public pronouncements critical of the government without going into hiding or expecting to be picked up and literally slaughtered at the Bundase Military Range.

Of course, I also vividly recognize the fact that being of Ewe ethnicity and a native speaker of the language would have definitely afforded Togbe Afede a blind eye or protection, just as was enjoyed by the other Ewe-speaking Accra High Court Judges who were picked up by the Rawlings- and Tsikata-contracted executioners on the night of the June 30, 1982 brutal and savage Mafia-style liquidation of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court Judges. He is also unpardonably hypocritical because Togbe Afede was an active member and gubernatorial participant in the Atta-Mills-led regime of the National Democratic Congress, as well as the John Dramani Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress. In the former instance, if memory serves this writer accurately, Togbe Afede was a member of the Atta-Mills side of the Transitional Team that negotiated the handover of the democratic reins of governance from then-President John Agyekum-Kufuor to President-Elect John Evans Atta-Mills.

The preceding fact alone ought to have cautioned the principals of the National House of Chiefs against the election of Togbe Afede, XIV, as their President. Under the present reprehensible circumstances, I can frankly, honestly and boldly assert that I have absolutely no respect, whatsoever, for a National House of Chiefs whose members scandalously and visibly appear to seriously lack both the common sense and good leadership principles to allow this panjandrum and popinjay of an invested traditional chieftain to manage their affairs. I also know, as they severally and collectively and amply and ignobly demonstrated in the leadup to the 2012 Presidential Election, that the members of the National House of Chiefs are not shamelessly above receiving bribes in the form of sheep, goats and vehicles from incumbent presidents seeking reelection in the dubious name of courtesy calls. It goes without saying that I would be shocked to the marrow, if Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo suddenly appeared in Kumasi doing “a Dramani” or “a Mahama” with some of these cocoyam-leaf-chomping chiefs.

I am also of absolutely no doubt that the pall of infra-dig brought upon the National House of Chiefs by Togbe Afede and his co-conspirators backers will take a considerable amount of time to repair. Meanwhile, even as I emphatically observed in a previous column on this very subject, absolutely no chieftain or cynical Ghanaian politician can stall the onward and inexorable tide of progress. At their most perniciously potent, these would-be nation-wreckers could only risk getting run over and irreparably crushed by the godly and goodly forces of progress.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 13, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]