Does Kwabena Agyepong See “Tsikata” in the Image of Akufo-Addo?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 10, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

I suppose this is what explains Mr. Kwabena Agyei Agyepong’s allegedly visceral hatred for Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, as reportedly written in a letter authored by Mr. Iddrisu Musah (aka Musah Superior), a copy of which was reportedly leaked to Kasapafmonline.com (See “Kwabena Agyepong Hates Akufo-Addo – Musah Superior” Ghanaweb.com 12/9/15). As of this writing, Mr. Agyepong had been indefinitely suspended from his post as General-Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

Other than his well-established notoriety for raw insolence, Mr. Agyepong had been convincingly proven by the party’s Disciplinary Committee to have violated a slew of the codes regulating the conduct of members and administrators. We shall fully take up this matter for ample discussion in due course. For now, however, we choose to focus attention on the allegation made by Mr. Superior, the well-known passionate Akufo-Addo partisan and former aide to the suspended NPP General-Secretary. Mr. Superior tells the quite credible story of Mr. Agyepong’s having demanded that a portrait of the 2016 NPP Presidential Candidate be promptly taken down from one of the walls of an office adjacent to that of the General-Secretary’s, because Mr. Agyepong simply could not abide having to look at any iconic, or pictorial, representation of the man whose sometime archrival he had served with fervid religiosity.

Now this is very strange because hanging the portraits of party flagbearers on walls at the headquarters appears to have been a routine practice, or tradition, going back to at least 1992, that is, to the beginning of the country’s Fourth-Republican dispensation, and it clearly served as a means of promoting the personality mandated to serve as the face of the party in the lead-up to a general election. If the foregoing observation is found to pass muster, then Nana Akufo-Addo may have suffered the kind of abject depravity that one can only expect from one’s most inveterate political opponent or enemy. Mr. Superior claims that it was this kind of crude and primitive animus that forced him to stop working for Mr. Agyepong at the party’s Asylum Down national headquarters.

For me, however, what was even more telling than anything else was when his Executive Assistant recently came public to vehemently deny news reports that the party’s General-Secretary had appeared before the NPP’s Disciplinary Committee and profusely apologized for his errant behavior and pleaded for punitive leniency. I cannot for the life of me, as it were, fathom any public posture that could be deemed more haughty and arrogant than that which was so boorishly displayed by Mr. Davis Opoku-Ansah. So abjectly had party discipline been dented that when the NPP’s DC decided to indefinitely suspend Mr. Agyepong from his post as General-Secretary, it was just a matter of course. In other words, the move was decidedly beyond dispute. Earlier on, we had been told that the NPP-DC had recommended a 15-month suspension, obviously aimed at ensuring that Mr. Agyepong, together with his associates, would be effectively kept at bay for the duration of the 2016 Akufo-Addo/Bawumia Presidential Campaign.

And here also must be recalled the fact that initially, the indefinitely suspended Chairman Paul A. Afoko was reported to be faced with the same disciplinary measure. Predictably, however, the man whose younger brother, Mr. Gregory Afoko, is presently standing trial for the acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, the former Upper-East Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, back-handedly rebuffed several invitation requests issued him by the NPP-DC and, before that, the party’s Council-of-Elders. It is quite curious, and wickedly so, that a cabal of top party administrators who had absolutely no interest in promoting the agenda of the same party’s flagbearer, whatsoever, should now be brazenly accusing Nana Akufo-Addo of plotting a coup to nullify their legitimately and democratically awarded mandate.

I have said this before and hereby repeat the same: that the New Patriotic Party’s Constitution requires radical amendments. And such amendments ought to entail the right of any legitimately elected flagbearer to select his/her own Campaign Chairman, General-Secretary and Administrative Staff with the blessing of a special committee expressly constituted for this purpose. Such a functionally organic arrangement could save the party from the kind of excruciating ordeal and embarrassment precipitated by the attempted hijacking and flagrant betrayal of public trust so jejunely and unprofessionally exhibited by Messrs. Afoko, Agyepong and Crabbe.

What I nearly forgot to significantly add to the foregoing is the fact that Mr. Agyepong may very well be suffering from some acute psychological misalliance of his cerebrum which causes him to mistake Nana Akufo-Addo for the two infamous Tsikata Cousins widely alleged to have orchestrated the primitive abduction and brutal assassination of the three Accra High Court judges and the retired Ghana Army major. And as is quite well known, Mr. Agyepong’s father was one of the judges savagely slain by the Trokosi Nationalists, Mafia-style, on June 30, 1982, on the “revolutionary” housecleaning watch of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings. The future President John Agyekum-Kufuor was Mr. Rawlings’s Local-Government Minister.