On the Run: Sammy Gyamfi Is Both on Point and Wrong on Akufo-Addo

President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is smack on point in his observation that the country’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), is highly likely to languish on the margins of Ghana’s political culture for quite a very long time, if its leaders keep peddling lies to the Ghanaian public in place of healthily playing the progressive and dutiful democratic role of a critically constructive opposition political party, as categorically mandated by the country’s 1992 Republican Constitution (See “Your Falsehood Peddling Will Keep You in Opposition – Nana Addo to NDC” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 11/22/18).

This warning comes in the wake of allegations by the Parliamentary Opposition, led by the notorious scofflaw and NDC-MP for Tongu-North Constituency, Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, that Nana Akufo-Addo intended to relocate the Somanya-, Krobo, based University of the Environment and Sustainable Development (UESD) to Bunso, where the University of the Environment, founded by the Okyenhene, Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin, II, with the assistance of the Dutch and other foreign governments, if memory serves this writer accurately, is already located.

That the NDC parliamentary opposition does not have a credible track-record of progressively developing the country, should not, in any way, detract from the fact that some key players have in the recent past made some discriminatory public-policy pronouncements that have not put the Akufo-Addo Administration in a positive light. For instance, it is on record that Mr. Samuel Atta-Akyea publicly decried the clearly politically discriminatory, or at least mischievous, decision by then-President John Dramani Mahama to locate the University of the Environment and Sustainable Development at Somanya, when there was already a similar institution located at Bunso, in Akyem-Abuakwa, which the erstwhile Mills-Mahama regime could have healthily and progressively supported with the requisite taxpayer resources, since the Bunso-located University of the Environment was not meant for the exclusive education of the people of Akyem-Abuakwa, Nana Akufo-Addo’s native sub-state and political stronghold, but rather for the education of Ghanaian citizenry at large.

But wait, The Okyenhene or, rather, the Akyem-Abuakwa Paramount Kings are infamous for parochially causing nearly every significant development project to be centered in and around Kyebi, the Akyem-Abuakwa royal capital. For instance, it is on record that the present-day Abuakwa State College was originally located at Akyem-Asafo, from where it was invidiously relocated to Kyebi in 1932 or thereabouts. As well, but for the stiff resistance put up by the Commander-in-Chief of the Adonten (Vanguard) Division of Akyem-Abuakwa or the Omanhene of Kukurantumi, St. Paul’s Secondary Technical School (today “High School”) would also have been rudely cannibalized by the powerful traditional politicians and elders of Kyebi. I also vividly recall as a first-grader, in the wake of the landmark overthrow of the Kwame Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), when the then Akyem-Kwabeng Men’s Teacher-Training College was summarily relocated to Kyebi.

Back then, there was already the Presbyterian Women’s Teacher-Training College located in the Akyem-Abuakwa royal capital. The relocated Kwabeng Men’s Teacher-Training College would shortly collapse, as it was clearly unsustainable. Today, Kyebi has a coed or mixed-gender teacher-training college. I have always wondered if it would not have been savvier for the Okyeman Council to have allowed the Kwabeng Men’s Teacher-Training College to survive and thrive where it was originally established and, perhaps, like the erstwhile Kyebi/Kibi Women’s Teacher-Training College, been also eventually expanded and converted into a coed or mixed-gender teacher-training college.

What I am clearly implying here is that while President Akufo-Addo is undoubtedly light years ahead of and far more enlightened and ethno-culturally inclusive than his Kyebi royal kinsmen – and, of course, mine as well – there is, nevertheless, an unsavory history of the sort of discriminatory policy initiatives and/or measures evocative of the sort being mischievously rehashed by the reprobate and cynical NDC operatives and morbidly used to their own political advantage, as it is to be logically expected, rather than realistically and objectively seeing Nana Akufo-Addo for what he represents and has represented for most of his adult life and civic and political career. The preceding notwithstanding, what Nana Akufo-Addo ought to be doing is to be firmly and repeatedly allaying the fears of his understandably concerned constituents and traditional neighbors of the Krobo State, instead of pretending as if the problem never existed.

The President could, for instance, invoke his own fee-free universal access to publicly-owned Senior High Schools into the country to credibly demonstrate that he does not intend to take present-day Ghanaian citizens down the primrose path of his relatively and inexcusably parochial and less politically and culturally enlightened ancestors and predecessors who, by the way, took decisions according to the morally and politically blighted tempers of the times.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York
November 22, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]