Afoko, Agyepong And The Prudential Bank Myth

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
May 28, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

News that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) stands to lose its headquarters building by the close of this month, because the 2012 Akufo-Addo Presidential Campaign contracted a GHC 2 Million by using this prime NPP property as collateral, has been swiftly and sharply debunked by the co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Data Bank, Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta (See "Prudential Bank Debt Leaked To Create Mischief - Ken Ofori-Atta" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/28/15). It appears that those in the Kyerematen faction of the party, who are desperate to finding an excuse for helping Messrs. Paul Afoko and Kwabena Agyei Agyepong keep their jobs, are prepared to go to any length, including the tactical fabrication of subterfuges, to fulfill their aim.

Unfortunately, it well appears that the end of the road for these political mischief-makers has been reached. They have decidedly hit a stonewall which, needless to say, they ought to have hit quite awhile before now. Anyway, the captain of these mischief-makers is a man by the name of Mr. Baah-Achamfuor (not to be confused with "Akyemfuor"), who recently founded an anti-Akufo-Addo pressure group called Save NPP Now! A couple of days ago, Mr. Baah-Achamfuo was reported to have given Nana Akufo-Addo 48 hours to vacate his 2016 Presidential-Candidacy Mandate or face tidal waves of anti-Akufo-Addo demonstrations Till Kingdom Come.

Mr. Baah-Achamfuor knows perfectly well that he and his so-called Save NPP Now! group of nuisance agitators have no legs to stand on, and so as soon as the story broke that the New Patriotic Party was in arrears, totaling some GHC 2 Million to Prudential Bank, whose executives had threatened to take possession of the party's Kokomlemle National Headquarters, Mr. Baah-Achamfuor and his group of rascally rubble-rousers took to the airwaves to make the untenably lurid claim that, somehow, the entire move against Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong began when the two criminal suspects began to question the fiscal responsibility and professional integrity of the so-called Akufo-Addo "Loyalists."

The latter terminology, it is significant to note, was coined by Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen's right-hand man, Nana Ohene-Ntow, a former NPP General-Secretary. The Kumasi Fufuo-Wolfing group must have been in a very good mood on this occasion. At another time and place in very recent memory, the so-called Akufo-Addo Loyalists would have been labeled as "The Akyem Mafia," of which group yours truly was once described by a South Carolina-resident neo-fascist Kyerematen flak as "a chartered member" in the government-owned Daily Graphic.

On our part, we have yet to settle on the most fitting name for the Kyerematen/Ohene-Ntow/McHypocrite/McNasty and McMole group of internal terror sponsors. We are also waiting to hear the Irmo, South Carolina, Chief-Propagandist of the Kumasi Fufuo-Wolfing Al-Qaeda inform the world that, somehow, it was the Akyem Mafia that both instigated and executed the inescapably barbaric acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, the Upper-East's Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party. Well, with fellow political truckers like the Kumasi Fufuo-Wolfing Al-Qaeda, who needs the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) for political adversaries or opponents?

At any rate, unlike Seton Hall University's Prof. H. Kwasi Prempeh, I simply don't see the "internecine" aspect of this conflict (See "Prof. H. Kwasi Prempeh: My Unsolicited Advice To The NPP" MyJoyOnline.com 5/28/15). But I also unreservedly concur with my "fellow countryman" and "fellow Akan," of course I am only from the Akyem-Mafia part of the country, that the New Patriotic Party is in mortal danger. This is not something that I find to be the least bit amusing. But even as that tired maxim goes: "It is what it is." If the New Patriotic Party is destined to go the way of the rest of humanity - and here, of course, I am tentatively thinking Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Liberia, Congo-Zaire-Congo, Somalia and Sierra Leone - then, by all means, Let Thy Kingdom come!

I am, obviously, writing this with a heavy heart - in spite of what the Trokosi Nationalists have done and continue to do to decimate the cream of our Akan sub-nation - but I also fully recognize the fact that this is no time for abject cowardliness. We, the Akyem Mafiosi, owe absolutely no debt of allegiance to any political bullies, no matter their height, stature or size. We are incurably "Republican," even as Dr. J. B. Danquah wrote in the "Introduction" to his perennial classic, Akan Laws And Customs And The Akyem-Abuakwa Constitution (1928). And, of course, we intend to maintain this status quo.

On the GHC 2 Million "Prudential" loan question, Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta significantly notes that as the Chairman of the Finance Committee of the 2012 Akufo-Addo Presidential Campaign, he contracted the aforesaid loan as his own personal sacrificial effort, or contribution, towards the collective good fortune of the New Patriotic Party; and also that the Prudential Bank managers ought to have addressed their loan-repayment memo to him directly and not to either Mr. Paul Afoko, the NPP National Chairman, or General-Secretary Agyei Agyepong.

Well, we need to emphatically get one thing clear: Those of us who have been closely following the political career of Mr. Kwabena Agyei Agyepong are well aware of the fact that the Kumasi Fufuo-Wolfing Al Qaeda founder has been taking virulent and intemperate verbal shots at Nana Akufo-Addo since at least 2008. And for those of our readers who may not know this, Mr. Agyepong is a contemporary of yours truly's at Prempeh College. And get this also loud and clear: Nana Akufo-Addo had absolutely no hand in the abduction and "Mafia-style" execution of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court Judges and the Retired Army Officer. Indeed, legend has it that Nana Akufo-Addo had been on the hit-list of the Trokosi Revolutionaries on that fateful day of June 30, 1982.

But, I guess, being a bona fide Akyem-Mafia clansman like me, Nana Akufo-Addo is expected by those who feel divinely superior and entitled to the presidency to gratefully and graciously take abuse of the kind visited daily on the family dog. But then, don't even family dogs fight back from time to time, particularly when the proverbial line has been crossed a little too irrationally and insensibly?

Long live Ghana! Long live the New Patriotic Party!! Long live Candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the next democratically elected President of Ghana!!!

_____________________________________________________________