Akufo-Addo Is No Stranger To Akropong

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

Oct. 13, 2014

E-mail: [email protected]

This piece is not intended in any way, shape or form, whatsoever, to dignify the trashy news report carried by the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Enquirer rag which was captioned "Bad Day for Akufo-Addo; But Mahama Goes to His Rescue" (10/13/14), and bylined Patrick Biddah. It is quite obvious from the name of the reporter that the editors and publisher of The Enquirer have absolutely no remarkable understanding and/or appreciation of Akan cultural protocol. And this is rather pathetic, being that Akans constitute the single most important ethnic and cultural polity in Ghana. Our seminal and massive contribution to the development of the country is also beyond dispute.

In all likelihood, the Enquirer's reporter was mischievously economizing with the truth when Mr. Biddah claimed that Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had either been rudely taken for granted or totally ignored by the Okuapemanhene, his namesake and the latter's august cabinet of divisional chiefs and orderlies. And here is the reason why: The presumptive 2016 presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a bona fide scion of the Okuapeman Royal Paramountcy on both sides of his family. What the foregoing means is that unlike President John Dramani Mahama, who was attending the Odwira Kese Festiva as a distinguished guest and in his capacity as Head-of-State, Nana Akufo-Addo was completely at home on both the durbar grounds and in the Akuapem State at large.

And, indeed, were he knowledgeable of the close historical ties between the Guan indigenes of Okuapeman and Okyeman, in particular Akyem-Abuakwa, Mr. Biddah would not have so boorishly passed off the sort of insufferably sub-standard guff which his editors at the Enquirer rag luridly published as headline news. All ideological differences aside, the Guan people of the Akuapem Scarp, of whose Gonja branch President Mahama is a bona fide scion, would not be the free people that they are today, as well as being located where they are presently, if the Ofori-Kumaa and Addo-Dankwa lineages of the Akyem-Abuakwa Royal Paramountcy had not doggedly pursued the noble "foreign" policy of unreserved recognition for the dignity and human rights of the Guans, in the morally Darwinian face of Akwamu-Dangbe-Ewe depredation.

Needless to say, any Ghanaian who has studiously followed the political and professional career of Nana Akufo-Addo ought to be well aware of him being culturally and even genetically imbued with this protective and altruistic spirit of Okyeman. Just the other day, for example, one of those mischief-making Volta Alliance Gang members, resident in London, UK, sophistically presumed to lump Nana Akufo-Addo and the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party with the pathologically and scandalously corrupt leaders of the ruling National Democratic Congress in one bowl, vis-a-vis the personal and collective administrative track records of the two ideological camps. Well, I cannot vouch for one or two minor factions among the ranks of the NPP leadership, nevertheless, as an organic ideological unit represented by the Kufuor government, the track record of the New Ptriotic Party is unquestionably unequalled in Fourth-Republican Ghana.

The Enquirer editors and publisher may be too pathologically dishonest to acknowledge the reality and/or veracity of the preceding, but the good news is that Ghanaian citizens and voters are too wide awake and savvy to ignore the same. We are also fully aware of the intransigently cynical corporate agenda of the National Democratic Congress' Wing of the Trokosi Nation to be facilely fooled by any debonair ethnic chauvinist.