Ablakwa, Akufo-Addo Shall Prevail Over Your Bunk-Blowing Shenanigans – Part Two

Maybe if narrow-minded and narcissistic politicians like Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa read widely on the critical subject of educational/academic administration, especially that aspect of this subject which deals with Mega-University Systems like the City University of New York (CUNY), yours truly’s alma-mater, comprised of some 22 full-fledged college campuses; and the State University of New York (SUNY), made up of some 60 full-fledged college and university campuses, he would begin to soundly appreciate the imperative need for the administrative consolidation and institutional organicity, in much the same way that charlatanic National Democratic Congress’ politicians like Mr. Ablakwa and former President John Dramani Mahama envisage the imperative need for the 54 or 55 countries on the African continent to be unified into a socioeconomic whole or a single much stronger and more efficient administrative entity.

I mean, isn’t it scandalously ironic for politicians like the key NDC operatives to see reason in a unified agglomeration of some 16 countries that constitute the far more formidable Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) but, somehow, get exponentially roiled up to lunatic proportions once the indispensable subject of the administrative streamlining of Ghanaian public universities for more efficient functioning and general academic and professional development and improvement comes up for national civic discussion? I was also not the least bit amused when Mr. Ablakwa, who was rather too young and too mentally underdeveloped during most of the period under discussion, to have even half-appreciated the decidedly intemperate and virulently anti-intellectual policies of Chancellor Jerry John Rawlings who, as The Maximum Military Dictator of Ghana, effectively destroyed the hitherto generally competitive and even enviable quality of the country’s higher educational institutions, in particular the three leading public academies in the country, namely, the University of Ghana, Legon; the present-day Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi; and the pedagogy-oriented University of Cape Coast (UCC), Cape Coast.

To be certain, as of this writing, only the University of Ghana was known to rank among the top-50 tertiary academies on the African continent. But guess what? Legon, as the University of Ghana is popularly known, does not even rank among the top-30 flagship academies on the African continent, in terms of the quality of pedagogy, professorial output at all levels of productivity, including research and industrial and technological contributions, physical plant facilities and general administrative capacity. So I really don’t know where Mr. Ablakwa sourced his abjectly nonsensical ranking of the quality of Ghana’s major public tertiary academies as being among the best and the most prestigious around the globe. Indeed, what his virulent and vehement protestation of the Public Universities Draft-Bill exemplifies is the inescapable fact that Mr. Ablakwa seems to be morbidly afraid of the very salutary culture of democratic governance that he would have Ghanaians pooh-pooh President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for supposedly being woefully bereft of. After all, the Public Universities Draft-Bill, as pointed out earlier, has yet to be fully read and vigorously debated on the august floor of Parliament, hopefully, with the unredacted and unmediated input of the Chief Administrators of the country’s major universities and colleges.

We must also emphatically observe that being statutorily independent of direct official or government interference, does not necessarily imply that under absolutely no circumstances do the administrators of these public tertiary academies have to take marching orders or any form of advisories or regulatory instructions from the executive leaders electorally mandated by Ghanaian citizens to conduct the affairs of the country, as democratically elected trustees of the people. Unfortunately for Mr. Ablakwa, I also happen to have as many years of teaching experience as his age and can readily and confidently attest to the inescapable fact that “Academic Freedom” comes with enormous responsibilities; it is not simply something that you do because it has been facilely written into a Republican Constitution incongruously drafted by an unconscionable gang of killer-robber-barons who never practiced what they have been fervidly preaching vociferously this past couple of years because as epic political losers, they are only capable of seeing the “screaming” side of it but not the leadership responsibilities that inextricably comes with the same.

Now, I don’t want to waste my time discussing the Mawutor Avoke Case at the University of Education, Winneba, because I am reliably informed by people on the ground, as it were, that the legitimately ousted former UEW Vice-Chancellor was a veritable Trokosi Nationalist Imposition (TNI). Needless to say, people who vehemently claim to champion academic freedom have absolutely no business imposing their kinsmen and clanswomen on the rest of us taxpaying bona fide Ghanaian citizens. The name of the game is “Merit-Based Appointments,” not the cheap propaganda of stark-naked garri-grating clowns drunkenly paraded as the Gold Standard. That is plain Fascist shenanigans, were congenital political scam-artists like Messrs. Ablakwa and Mahama to ask me.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
April 12, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]