By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 18, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
I just chanced upon this news article captioned “Akufo-Addo Not Cleared of £ 100,000 Illegal Payment – Ohene Ntow” (Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/18/15). Well, as far as I have been able to search and verify, in a bid to objectively establishing the identity and character of the man, largely through media gleanings of his rancorous anti-Akufo-Addo tirades, Nana Akomea ought to have been savvy enough not to have ventured anywhere near the treacherous trail of Nana Ohene-Ntow. I came to this sobering conclusion in the lead-up to the 2012 and 2016 New Patriotic Party presidential primary, when the former NPP General-Secretary launched what Mr. Ohene-Ntow hoped would be a damaging blotch on the character of Nana Akufo-Addo. So in a real sense, Mr. Kyerematen’s former Chief Propagandist belongs in the same category of New Patriotic Party rebels as the former Idiot-of-Irmo, South Carolina, now rechristened as the Cretin-of-California.
I first encountered the man in the lead-up to the 2008 Presidential Election at Dr. Akuoko’s clinic in Queens, New York City. This was in the wake of the patent burlesque that was the 17-man field of candidates who contested the then-ruling New Patriotic Party’s presidential nomination. As part of his post-primary conciliation efforts, Akufo-Addo, the eventual winner, had generously consented to the inclusion of nearly each and every one of his challengers – with the understandable exception of then-Vice-President Aliu Mahama, late, and Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen – on his presidential campaign team. Mr. Kyerematen would shortly resign from the New Patriotic Party, citing irreconcilable differences between his supporters and those of the man who had soundly trounced him and would do so, again, two more times in the near future.
For reasons best known to himself and his associates and assigns, Mr. Kyerematen, who was widely reported to have arrived in the Big Apple at about the same time as Nana Akufo-Addo, did not attend the Meet-And-Greet-The Candidate confab at the Akuoko clinic. The Cretin-of-California, he would shortly assume the alias of Idiot-of-Irmo, South Carolina, was smack-dab in the mix and actually came dangerously close to a shoulder-to-shoulder contact with yours truly who instinctively, and intuitively, avoided this very short and obnoxiously garrulous man. Needless to say, yours truly is himself not tall in stature, but he was, nonetheless, quite staggered to recognize the former Idiot-of-Irmo, South Carolina, to be of an even more diminutive stature. And, oh, lest I forget, Dr. Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng was also absent from that late-night gathering. He probably was not even in New York City.
Naturally, I had been quite surprised by the diminutive stature of The Idiot primarily because he had hitherto been kicking such a fuss on the campaign trail as to give the rather quizzical impression of him being poised to becoming the biggest electoral upset on the postcolonial Ghanaian political landscape since the then-future President Kwame Nkrumah in 1951, except that the Ghana of 2007 was a far cry from that decidedly innocent era of the country’s modern global political emergence in the twentieth century. The Idiot would later accuse yours truly, whom he would also knight as a “Charter Member of the Akyem/Kyebi Mafia,” as one who seemed to harbor what he then termed as “gratuitous hatred” for the man who presumptuously and misguidedly, if also maliciously, and sneeringly credited Nana Akufo-Addo with Dr. J. B. Danquah’s indisputably auspicious and progressive concept of “Indigenous Capitalism,” a concept of whose abject contempt The Idiot had not hesitated to register. He would even dare the man whose trusted employee, specifically whose Director of Communication, he would become in the lead-up to Election 2008 to debate him the same.
Back in 2007, Nana Ohene-Ntow, the former University of Ghana’s communications lecturer, sported the suave deportment of the proverbial consummate diplomat. He would later become an inveterate Akufo-Addo detractor and Chief Propagandist for the ill-fated Kyerematen Presidential Campaign. Like the Cretin-of-California, Mr. Ohene-Ntow would so woefully underestimate the massive groundswell of support for Nana Akufo-Addo, both within and without the New Patriotic Party (NPP), that he would become shell-shocked and, even perhaps irreparably traumatized, by the blowout outcome of the 2014 NPP presidential primary that saw Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia being elected for the third consecutive time as party flagbearer and running-mate, respectively.
To be certain, Nana Ohene-Ntow has done and said worse things to and about Nana Akufo-Addo, on both the campaign trail and outside of the same, to make his latest insinuative attempt to irreparably tarnish the image and personality of Ghana’s former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice flabbergast any studious observer and/or student of New Patriotic Party political culture. Anyway, in the contents of the article referenced at the beginning of this column, Mr. Ohene-Ntow is not directly accusing Nana Akufo-Addo of having grossly misappropriated some party funds in the dubious name of the Talensi by-election campaign. He is only strongly suggesting the same by way of a retributive salvo because, according to Mr. Ohene-Ntow, Nana Akomea, the NPP’s Communications Director, has slighted his integrity. Mr. Ohene-Ntow is also threatening to unleash further Akufo-Addo-damning “evidence” of financial impropriety, should Nana Akomea decide to further up the ante.
Whatever be the truth of Mr. Ohene-Ntow’s allegation, the man ought to at least be credited for affirming what many of us have known for quite some time now: that it was Chairman Paul Afoko’s adamant decision and stubborn determination to run a one-man dictatorship at party headquarters, largely counter to the interest of the party’s 2016 Presidential Candidate, that engendered the current messy bout of administrative hiccups rocking the New Patriotic Party. There likely may be enough blame to go around, as it were. But our elders and sages have also said that the rotting of any fish invariably begins from its head.