Wisconsin University?

It is my late father's alma mater. I mean, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the main campus of one of the most highly respected public academies in the United States. And so when I saw the caption "Wisconsin Uni Faces Closure Over GHC 600K Unpaid Tax" (See Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/22/15), I knew something wasn't quite right about that news headline. And for those of our readers who may not be aware of this, the University of Wisconsin, at Madison, is also the headquarters of the US Department of Agriculture. I suppose it is the only cabinet portfolio whose occupant resides outside of Washington, DC. It is appropriately located in the American Mid-West, because this is also the heartland of agricultural activities here in the United States.

For sometime now, I have been wondering whether an incurably copycat Ghana could not copy all the right things from advanced capitalist democracies like the United States, by our government's also relocating our Ministry of Agriculture outside our nation's capital of Accra to, say, Tamale or the Sekondi-Takoradi vicinity. It could even be located in Sunyani. That way, the Ministry would be more effective in providing extension services to our food-crop farmers, the way the former West African Cocoa-Research Institute (WACRI), located at Akyem-Tafo, used to serve the country's cash-crop farmers and the industry in general. Those days, in the 1930s and 40s, the Eastern Region, including present-day Greater-Accra Region, where the Tetteh-Quarshie-imported his cocoa beans, first found conducive cultivational footing, was the heartland and the mainstay of our country's economy.

And even as the immortalized and foremost champion of the Ghanaian cocoa farmer, Dr. J. B. Danquah, once poignantly noted, it was the massive commercial production of cocoa between 1890 and 1920 that brought Ghana into the orbit of the modern economic system. Before then, it had been the odious and callous trading in African humanity; and by the middle of the nineteenth century, what became known as the "Legitimate Trade," largely in oil-palm and para-rubber production. My maternal great-grandfather, Theodore Adolph Kwadwo Aboagye, of the Akyem-Asiakwa and the Asante-Dwaben royal families, came of age and played a vital role in this era of Ghana's economic development.

Legend has it that the old man owned sizeable cocoa and para-rubber plantations and at one time permanently employed about 30 laborers. He also owned sizeable food farms. Of course, he also had three wives. He must have at one time been the single biggest farmer at Akyem-Asiakwa, and definitely one of the largest planters in the whole of Akyem-Abuakwa and, by extension, the erstwhile Gold Coast. Today, even as I write, there is a large farm area at Akyem-Asiakwa called Nana Aboagye, after my maternal great-grandfather. Legend also has it that Nana Aboagye had barely missed being enstooled as Asiakwahene, or the Nifahene of Akyem-Abuakwa, or at least one of the chiefs of the township. He had been disqualified because one of his eldest daughters - at some point in time - had begotten a child out of wedlock.

In those days, our traditional leaders and cultural custodians did not take kindly to what they deemed to be tantamount to moral decadence. Interestingly, that grandaunt of mine, Maame Akosua Ntimmaa, was also my favorite granny. I never got along with my own maternal grandmother, for reasons that were never clear to me until very recently when they were explained to me by one of my elder cousins. It all had something to do with a maid from Asante-Bonwire that my mother had brought along with her to Akyem-Kwabeng from Asante-Mampong in the early 1960s, when my father left his teaching job at the Serwaa-Amaninampong Presbyterian Middle School to attend the erstwhile University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama. Today, the latter is called the School for the Performing Arts, another blind copycatting of the Americans. My mother had to take up abode for sometime with her parents at the Kwabeng Presbyterian Minister's Manse.

And, oh, I forgot to add that it was Great-Grandpa Kwadwo Aboagye who brought about the revolutionary revival of Presbyterianism in Akyem-Abuakwa in the early 1890s, by collecting and settling some of the Basel Missionaries at Akyem-Begoro, which then became a nodal center of Christian education and culture in modern Ghana.

Now, I don't know whether the Wisconsin University in Ghana has any formal and/or legitimate affiliation with the one at Madison, which my late father attended between late 1971 and 1973, and from which he earned his Master of Arts degree in Theatrrical Arts and Lighting Technology, perhaps the first Ghanaian to do so in his subject area. But it is also interesting for me to learn that the Chairman of the Academic Council of the Accra-based Wisconsin University is Justice Dotse, of the Atuguba panel fame of the 2012 presidential election petition. We also learn that the Chairman of Wisconsin University's Board of Trustees is a Dr. Emmanuel Owusu, and that both gentlemen have signed an undertaken to defray at least half of the institution's GHC 600,000 arrears owed the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) by August 24.

We hope Wisconsin University successfully comes out of its current debt burden to become a major force in Ghanaian tertiary academic culture. But you know one funny story here? When I first read about Wisconsin University's owing of the Ghana Revenue Authority some GHC 600,000, the first thought that crossed my mind was: "To what good use would the GRA put such tax arrears to, once settled, other than wastefully and criminally line the pockets of Monsieur Mahama and his Abongo Boys of Flagstaff House infamy?