The Trokosi Boys Want Your Job, Most Rev.!

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

You may call me any detestable name in the book; what you cannot aptly tag me is a gratuitous hater of the Anlo-Ewe/National Democratic Congress-leaning media. You may not believe this, but I saw the latest attempt to irreparably tarnish the image and reputation of the Most Rev. Emmanuel Asante coming (See "Rev. Asante Rejects Herald's Half-Hearted Apology; Threatens Legal Action" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/23/15). I am no latter-day prophet, by the way.

You see, the Anlo-Ewe Wing of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) is determined to thoroughly "Ewenize" or "Ewe-ize" - take your pick, dear reader - the country as rapidly as it takes to say "Hello!" This is no happenstance. It comes directly from the apologetic playbook of perhaps the most infamous Anlo-Ewe tribal faux-theorist and disseminator of anti-Akan violence who met his own death at the hands of the even more violent Al-Shabab terror sponsors in Kenya some two years ago. Prof. Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor's death in Kenya was rather ironic because he, together with the late Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, once threatened to induce a "Kenyaesque" apocalypse in Ghana, if the recently retired Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan did not call the 2008 presidential election in his favor.

The playbook in question is called The Ghana Revolution: Background Account From A Personal Perspective. I strongly suspect, by its rather curious imprimatur, that the book was either self-published or self-financed or both. What is significant to observe here is the fact that the political tactic of putting adherents of the libertarian Danqah-Busia-Dombo tradition on the defensive is not new. In 1961, or thereabouts, for instance, when the Sekondi-Takoradi railway workers embarked on an industrial action, an increasingly desperate President Nkrumah accused Dr. Danquah, his former mentor turned archnemesis, of having called a "secret" meeting at his Accra residence to instigate the strike. Nkrumah strongly believed that the unionized workers were too daft to recognize the deleterious impact of his "tighten-your-belt" austerity measures and had to be instigated by someone of superior intellect.

The fact of the matter, as Danquah was to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, was that all the meetings had been conspicuously advertised in several of the leading public newspapers. And what was more, none of the meetings held by the members of the main opposition United Party (UP) at the Danquah residence had been about the Sekondi railway workers strike. Nkrumah would also accuse Danquah of having personally traveled to Sekondi-Takoradi and Kumasi to roil up the workers. Danquah, here also, would prove beyond any shadow of doubt that he had not traveled beyond his hometown of Kyebi-Adadientem, some forty-five miles from Accra (See Okoampa-Ahoofe's Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana. iUniverse, 2005).

And so it did not come as any surprise to me that former President John Agyekum-Kufuor would be accused of having held a "secret" meeting to help the fractious movers and shakers of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) iron out their differences, thereby auspiciously positioning the party in its bid to clinching victory in Election 2016. The editor-publisher of the Herald newspaper, like President Nkrumah in 1961, has accused the Chairman of the so-called National Peace Council, Rev.-Prof. Emmanuel Asante, of having attended the July 9 meeting at the private residence of President Kufuor. The truth of the matter, as the Methodist Church of Ghana's prelate has convincingly attested, is that on July 9, Rev. Asante was on a working tour of Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium.

And yet Mr. Lawrence Dogbe was able to physically plant Rev. Asante at the scene of the NPP's peace talks. The dear reader can just imagine what would have happened to the Peace Council chief on June 30, 1982. At any rate, Mr. Dogbe also has the temerity to haughtily assert that the meeting was "secret" because it was not advertised in the media, nor did it admit of the presence of any journalists. How criminally stupid it is for the Herald newspaper editor to expect that every executive meeting of any political party in the country ought to be pre-announced in the media. What is more, the meeting was not scheduled as a press conference.

Rev. Asante, refreshingly and boldly, has observed that if he had been physically present in the country, he would definitely have responded to any invitation to help broker for peace in the New Patriotic Party or any other political party, for that matter. He is also threatening legal action against the Herald newspaper editor.

You see, the TNCs - Trokosi Nationalist Critics - operate on the fuel of raw intimidation. They undoubtedly learned such a dirty art of political criminality from their patriarch and the bloody architect of the Anlo-Ewe revolution, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings. They also want a Trokosi clansman of theirs to have Rev. Asante's job by hook and/or crook. That is part of the grand scheme of the Awoonor-fangled "De-Akanization" process.

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