Give President Akufo-Addo His Due

It took nearly 20 years to come to fruition, but it can scarcely be gainsaid that it was the steely determination of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and that of the Asantehene, His Majesty, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, that made possible the definitive resolution of the age-old feud between the Abudu and Andani Royal Gates of the Dagbon Paramountcy (See “Bolin-Lana Welcomes New Ya-Naa, Abukari Mahama” Modernghana.com 1/18/19). It is true that former President John Agyekum-Kufuor set up the Wuaku Commission that investigated the 2002 internecine hostilities that culminated in the brutal and shameful decapitation of Ya-Naa Yakubu Andani, II. It is equally true that President Kufuor established the Otumfuo Committee of Eminent Chiefs to find a lasting solution to the infamous and unduly protracted Yendi Chieftaincy Crisis.

But, of course, the ultimate truth is that President Kufuor was unable to successfully resolve the Yendi Deadlock until President Akufo-Addo recently brought – what we all hope to be – a definitive resolution to the longest-lasting major chieftaincy dispute in the country. We must also not forget the fact that there was an 8-year interregnum or hiatus between the official political exit of Mr. Kufuor, on January 7, 2009 and January 7, 2017, when President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who had twice lost the Presidential Election, finally, assumed the democratic reins of governance. In those 8 years, we had the National Democratic Congress’ regimes of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills and the man who chauvinistically and ethnocentrically and, some say, opportunistically styled himself as the “Northern Star,” or the only Ghanaian politician who was capable of expediting the development of the then so-called Three-Northern-Regions, in order for the latter to catch up with the relatively more economically advanced southern-half of the country in the shortest possible time.

Well, the fact of the matter is that barely two years after he assumed the democratic reins of governance, President Akufo-Addo could be clearly and objectively envisaged to have brought more development, both in terms of political and cultural upgrade, as well as material development, into the northern-half of the country than the so-called Northern Star did in the 8 years that Mr. Mahama and the late President Atta-Mills held the reins of governance. In sum, under two terms of National Democratic Congress’ leadership, absolutely nothing progressive and/or constructive was done to effectively or definitively resolve the Yendi Chieftaincy Crisis. If anything at all, the crisis got even worse.

But this is hardly news to any avid and attentive observer and student of the Ghanaian political scene. From their woeful inability or flat refusal to retrieve Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome’s loot, to the abject and total bankrupting of the Kufuor-implemented National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), the Mills-Mahama diarchy left in its wake any remarkable level of development for Ghana except that which was palpable or measurable in either material or socioeconomic terms. The country also increasingly became more violent than had ever been in Ghana’s postcolonial annals. For instance, in the leadup to the 2016 general election, an unprecedented quantity of munitions was routinely seized at various times in Aflao, Ghana’s southeastern border town with Togo. We may never establish the exact volume or quantity of munitions that crossed into Ghana through the Volta Region, the former electoral stronghold of the National Democratic Congress, I hope.

Indeed, we may very well be reaping the dividend of wanton violence bequeathed President Akufo-Addo by the Mahama regime. Now, regarding the resolution of the Yendi Chieftaincy Crisis, it was almost the singular, but hardly the original, act of a hyper-progressive Nana Akufo-Addo in reactivating the Committee of the Eminent Chiefs, with the ever-gracious assent of the Asantehene and the goodwill of the Abudu and Andani royal families, or gates, and their allies, as well as the airtight vigilance of our national security agencies that made the glorious accession of Ya-Naa Alhaji Abukari Mahama the success story that it has become today. In fact, I even came across a quite instructive opinion piece in which the author heartily saluted this epic feat with the following caption: “The Rise of Dagbong, The Lion Has Come Home [Again].” Now, that is what true statesmanship is about.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
January 19, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]