The Adakabre Name Always Sounded Weird to Me

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 9, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]

I never listened to any of the programs that he hosted at Adom-Fm or presently at Neat-Fm, but I must confess that the name/nickname “Adakabre” has always given me the goose bumps anytime that I have come across it in a news article, which was where I first came across it. There is something eerily and morbidly “casket-like” or “coffin-like” about the name. In retrospect, however, I may have heard the voice of Mr. Frimpong-Manso once or twice when I Googled up either Joy-Fm or one of the plethora of Ghanaian FM radio stations to get a direct feel for events and affairs on the ground at home. I have also read several pieces on Mr. Frimpong-Manso’s rather scandalous allegation about him being threatened several times in the recent past by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the three-time Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).

The politics of personal destruction, as many an American political pundit is wont to cast it, has been running rampant and riotous since the inception of Ghana’s Fourth-Republican dispensation. But it has become even more especially so, ever since Nana Akufo-Addo was elected flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party in 2008, against the wishes of a section of both the leadership and membership of the party who would rather have had another candidate represent their wishes and aspirations. That candidate, as we are all fully aware of, has run two more times against Akufo-Addo. Unfortunately for his platoon of diehard supporters and sympathizers, this quite ambitious candidate has progressively and consistently fared worse at the two consecutive primaries held by the NPP since the period under discussion. During the 2007 watershed electoral primary season, following his convincing loss to Nana Akufo-Addo, the widely alleged favorite candidate of then lame-duck President John Agyekum-Kufuor broke ranks with the party’s leadership by tendering his resignation to then-party Chairman Peter Mac Manu. It was a strategic move that clearly appeared to have registered its desired impact and momentarily fulfilled its primary objective of denying Akufo-Addo a shot at the presidency.

Ironically, this glaringly mischievous political gambit ended up complicating matters for Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen, popularly known as “Alan Cash.” It well appears that the constituents whom he so facilely counted upon to facilitate the ready unseating of the main stumbling block to his presidential ambitions critically examined the practical realities of the country’s political terrain, did some soul-searching and soberly arrived at the more progressive conclusion that their long-term interests lay in the good fortunes of Nana Akufo-Addo. But even more significantly, these constituents were savvy enough to realize that the benighted days of sub-ethnic chauvinism and political myopia had absolutely no place in the country’s new democratic political culture and dispensation.

What is disconsolately tragic about Mr. Frimpong-Manso’s allegation, the accuser has since honorably recanted, is the unmistakable coloration of its decidedly nepotistic edge. Mr. Frimpong has been quoted to be saying that his virulently pathological inability to support the presidential ambitions of Nana Akufo-Addo is primarily because he is cousins with Mr. Kyerematen. What breaks my heart even more is the fact that Adakabre’s own father, a Mr. Robert Okyere Frimpong-Manso, or some such name, claims not to even be a bona fide member of the New Patriotic Party. The 78-year-old Mr. Frimpong-Manso claims to be an executive operative of the Greenstreet-led rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP); and yet, the elder Mr. Frimpong-Manso or “Adakabre Senior” has staunchly and fanatically joined cause with his son for the inexorable destruction of Nana Akufo-Addo!

It breaks my heart because I am also related to both Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Kyerematen. I have staunchly supported Nana Akufo-Addo primarily in principle, because I firmly believe that he has been given a raw deal by some political associates whom he had initially been of the grossly mistaken belief, in retrospect, believed in the same ideological tenets and objectives as himself. Needless to say, ours is the real world where traitors abound at every turn. And so, perhaps, we ought not to somehow pretend that it was always going to be smooth sailing through and through.

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