Will Arthur Kennedy's Medical License Rental Win ....

NPP the Presidency in 2016?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Oct. 24, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]

The man who calls Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo the most violent politician in postcolonial Ghana, also claims to be a "leading member" and a "prime investor" of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). One wonders why Dr. McHypocrite, as Dr. Arthur Kobina Kennedy is popularly known, would politically associate himself with the very party which Nana Akufo-Addo has been leading for some six years now. Is it because, contrary to what he would have his audiences believe, Dr. McHypocrite is a staunch believer in the politics of violence himself, or the man is simply an idiot?

He also did not contribute a dime towards Nana Akufo-Addo's 2016 Presidential Candidacy Campaign, except torrents of personal attacks. What is more, the man has spent most of the last six years maligning Nana Akufo-Addo and explaining why he thinks Ghana's former Foreign Minister does not deserve to be afforded a third shot the presidency. He was actually the first man to volley a salvo against Nana Akufo-Addo's decision to gun for the presidency for the third time, vowing to personally run against his former political patron if none of his anti-Akufo-Addo associates decided to do so.

In the sordid books of the Asebu-John Fitzgerald Kennedy (or Asebu-JFK), true democracy means kicking Nana Akufo-Addo off the presidential ticket of the New Patriotic Party at all costs, and replacing the latter with either Dr. McHypocrite himself or one of his disgruntled fellow former employees of the former New Patriotic Party Member for Akyem-Abuakwa South. What is also interesting here is that it was the three-time New Patriotic Party flagbearer who offered the physician turned seasonal politician and perpetual agent-provocateur his first most significant job in Ghanaian politics, as the Communications Director of the 2008 Akufo-Addo Presidential Campaign.

The Akan people have a saying which runs as follows: "Fear the one in closest proximity to you." I prefer to put the same more poetically as follows: "Twice character-assassinated, thrice divinely vigilant." I hope Nana Akufo-Addo is paying sedulous attention. Still, Dr. Arthur Kobina Kennedy makes for a very fascinating study in "Dog-Bites-The-Hand-That-Feeds-Him." Indeed, about the most significant professional achievement of the Fante-Asebu native made the national headlines here in the United States of America some two years ago. It had to do with Dr. JFK's decision to rent out his medical-practice license to a fellow South Carolina-resident medically trained but unlicensed, or board uncertified, physician.

Well, the rest of the story is fairly well known. It goes, roughly, as follows: Having temporarily purchased his best friend's license to practice medicine, perhaps in hopes of securing his own at some point in time, the renter also began to quite rationally and logically entertain the idea that he had paid enough money to justify his complete and effective assumption of the professional identity of Asebu-JFK. Well, everything went on smoothly until the poor renter made bold to use the "landlord's" social security number and other pertinent documents to sign up for credit cards, which he generously used to bankrupt his equally criminal benefactor. The "ungrateful" renter would eventually plead guilty in court. At least that is what one version of the story maintains.

In the end, a smooth-talking Dr. Kennedy would claim to have availed the renter of his medical-practice license when the two partners in crime decided to open a medical practice together. In other words, according to Dr. Kennedy, the renter knavishly took undue advantage of his generosity. Did I hear somebody say, "Some generosity, indeed!"? Of course, it beats my imagination that such a depraved and thoroughgoing scam-artist was so easily let off the hook by security and legal authorities in South Carolina.

Equally mind-boggling is the fact that this inveterate Akufo-Addo detractor does not seem to have enough sense of shame to just shut up, lick his wounds and put up or get along with the 2016 Akufo-Addo Presidential Campaign Agenda. He simply does not seem to have been afforded this most fundamental level of etiquette by whoever raised him. And to make matters even worse for himself and his political fortunes in the offing, Dr. JFK has resorted to publicly espousing an anti-Akufo-Addo death wish by incessantly and pontifically calling for a "post-mortem" to be conducted on the latter's failure to clinch elections 2008 and 2012, now that his devious schemes against the former Kufuor Justice Minister appear to have been irreversibly and irreparably shattered by those who matter most in the New Patriotic Party, that is, the delegates and state-side members and supporters and sympathizers of the NPP, the real floating voters.

Now the homeless man is hopping from one radio station to another spewing guff about how it would be tantamount to "playing an ostrich for anyone to think that there is unity in the NPP," and that anyone who does so "is not serious" (See "Nana-Bawumia Ticket Does Not Guarantee Victory in 2016 - Arthur K." Adomonline.com/Ghanaweb.com 10/24/14). The real fact of the matter is that anybody who thinks and believes that the Asebu-JFK is a bona fide, or authentic, member of the New Patriotic Party must be living in a fool's paradise. At least not while Akufo-Addo rules the roost. And I really mean it!

How, for instance, can one constructively explain why Dr. Kennedy's book detailing his personal take on what went wrong with Election 2008, vis-a-vis the fortunes of the New Patriotic Party, was so curiously and nihilistically titled "Chasing the Elephant into the Bush"? Does anybody suppose that this was completely accidental? Well, for those of our readers who may either not know this or remember where Dr. Kennedy got the title for his snow-job of a book, it came from no other pesky personality than the notorious turd-talking Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the General-Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress.

In other words, during the entire 2008 electioneering campaign season, Dr. Kennedy was smack-dab in bed with blood-bathing NDC operatives like the man popularly known as General Mosquito, even while being generously paid by the Akufo-Addo Presidential Campaign as the latter's Communications Director. As so on the admittedly critical question of political post-mortems, the first order of business for the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia Ticket is to studiously ensure that political cross-dressers and forked-tongue reprobates like Dr. McHypocrite do not come anywhere near its strategic command center and/or apparatus.

By the way, why hasn't the Asebu-JFK already performed his own post-mortem on the party's elections 2008 and 2012 debacles and shared the same with the front-row leaders of the New Patriotic Party? Dr. Kennedy has said countless times that Nana Akufo-Addo is the most violent politician in postcolonial Ghanaian history and society. And also that Akufo-Addo's penchant for violence makes Messrs. Kwame Nkrumah and Jerry John Rawlings look like angels. Can anybody trust Arthur Kennedy with the destiny of the New Patriotic Party? Is Arthur Kennedy a serious member of the New Patriotic Party?

Could have fooled me. Yes, Asebu-JFK could have fooled me!

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