Akufo-Addo Is Not Called "Medofo Adaadaa Me," Mr. Opoku-Agyemang
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Sept. 5, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
Who in Ghanaian national politics, by the way, is called "Medofo Adaadaa Me"? Well, the pathologically thuggish Alan Kyerematen shill, Mr. Kwame Opoku-Agyemang, would have you believe that the unmistakable nominal reference is to Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Mr. Opoku-Agyemang may do well to keep his "Katakyie" accolade and properly share it with the members of his own family and clan. What is most significant to note here, though, is that the Asante-Bekwai Asakyiri clansman has thrown the gauntlet vis-a-vis the most trustworthy personality among the top leadership of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). And we are left with absolutely no other alternative but to frontally respond to the same (See "Never Trust Akufo-Addo; He Would Deceive You in 2016" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/5/14).
The truth of the matter is that in the lead-up to the 1992 nomination of the immortalized Prof. Albert Adu-Amankwaa Boahen (my own deceased mother was classmates at Begoro Girls' Middle Boarding School with Adu Boahen's younger sister) as Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), the first person to have held the same, Messrs. J. H. Mensah and John (Kofi Diawuo) Agyekum-Kufuor deviously ganged up against the former Head of the Department of History at Ghana's flagship academy, the University of Ghana, when it became incontrovertibly evident that neither Mr. Mensah nor Mr. Kufuor could defeat the fearless fire-spitting Prof Boahen. The latter would shortly go on to handily defeat the two aforementioned gentlemen.
Either out of raw shame or guilt or a pang of his conscience, or perhaps a combination of all three behavioral elements, Mr. Mensah would soberly and defensively let on to party delegates that he had been recklessly motivated by the fact of Mr. Kufuor's being married to Mr. Mensah kid-sister to throw his votes and weight behind the former Atwima-Nwabiagya Popular-Front Party (PFP) Member of Parliament during Ghana's Third Republic. Nana Akufo-Addo had absolutely no hand in such dastardly nepotistic shenanigans.
We must also significantly point out the obviously rarely spoken fact of Prof. Adu-Boahen's father's Akyem-Abuakwa moorings having been viciously, albeit gratuitously, used to victimize this bona fide Akyem-born and raised Asante-descended member of the Dwaben Royal Family. What I am, of course, boldly and frontally suggesting here is that Prof. Adu-Boahen was more Asante, in terms of ethnicity, as reckoned among the Akan, than the half-Denkyira future President John Agyekum-Kufuor himself! But alas, in the minds of Mr. Kufuor and his backers, Prof. Adu-Boahen did not belong; Adu-Amankwaa was not Asante enough.
Now let's fast-forward to 1996. And here, too, there is incontrovertible evidence that it was the Kufuor-Mensah camp that resolutely prevented Prof. Adu-Boahen from being afforded a second shot at the flagbearership of the New Patriotic Party. Akufo-Addo had absolutely nothing to do with it; if anything at all, it was Nana Akufo-Addo who fiercely defended the legitimacy of Prof. Adu-Boahen's being afforded a second shot at the presidency. And so, really, Mr. Opoku-Agyemang actually vindicates the evenhanded trustworthy credentials of Nana Akufo-Addo, when the Kyerematen hireling pointedly recalls the all-too-justifiable measure of condign justice and retributive favor that the future Kufuor Attorney-General and Minister of Justice returned to a second-chance seeking Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor. In other words, what made Mr. Kufuor strongly believe that, somehow, he was more deserving of a second shot at the presidency, on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party, than Prof. Adu-Boahen?
You see, I have always maintained the following philosophy, and I humbly stand to be corrected, that the sole fundamental difference between an Asante and an Akyem is the fact that every well-educated Asante graduates to become an enlightened Akyem, just as every narrow-minded and self-serving Akyem bully is a bona fide Asante native at heart. I mean, how else did Mr. Kufuor and his supporters not expect their point man/prized presidential race horse to be meted the same raw deal that they had so coldly served Prof. Adu Amankwaa Boahen?
I am the grandson of Osabarima Amankwaa-Pam of Akyem-Nkronso, Akwamu and Adanse, a veritable scion of Adanse-Pipim. And you say I don't know what I am talking about? Well, I am also the grandson of Adanse-and-Dwaben royal Obaapanyin Adwoa Apeakoramaa of Kyebi-Aburaso and Adadientem. Now get off your borrowed half-bred steed and give me a good fight, Bekwai Asakyiri thug. There was Aduana and then Biretuo and Ayoko before Asakyiri, your Aduana-surplus clan. Damn it!
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