LisaRaye McCoy was enstooled as the Queen mother of Progress and Development of Agona-Kwanyako
I sincerely don’t see the sort of egregious or flagrant blunder that Mr. Benjamin Dotsei Malor, the former Mahama-appointed New York-based United Nations’ communications operative, appears to see in the widely reported enstoolment of the “High-Yeller” African-American Hollywood actress by the name of LisaRaye McCoy by the Chief and Sub-Chiefs and the people of Agona-Kwanyako, in the Central Region of Ghana.
The enstoolment ceremony itself appears to have taken place in Hollywood, California, with Ms. McCoy being invested as the Queen mother of Progress and Development of Agona-Kwanyako. It also appears that Mr. Malor has a problem with the media portrayal of the celebrity inductee as “The Queen Mother of Ghana” (See “How Does the Name of Ghana Get Taken So Lightly and in Vain by a Hollywood Celebrity?” Ghanaweb.com 11/9/19).
I suppose one could also aptly respond to the question posed by the caption of Mr. Malor’s opinion piece by promptly observing that his question may be best answered by the organizers and/or hosts of the rather glitzy ceremony that saw the investiture of Ms. McCoy as the Nkosuohemaa or Queenmother of Progress and Development of Agona-Kwanyako, as already noted in the preceding paragraph. But even more significant must be pointed out the fact that Mr. Malor was Director of Communications and Spokesman for then-President John Dramani Mahama, when some two Saudi-born Yemeni terror suspects, long incarcerated but never trialed by the United States’ Military Command at the latter’s Cuba naval base, located at Guantanamo Bay, were secretly negotiated for settlement in Ghana by the key operatives of the then-ruling government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), stealthily chaperoned by, you guessed right, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, without the necessary parliamentary notification and, thus, the knowledge of the legitimately elected representatives of the Ghanaian citizenry and the electorate.
Indeed, it is highly likely that Mr. Malor had been in the know about this most flagrant and scandalous – to speak much less about the downright criminal – foreign policy decision. If, indeed, highly privileged citizens like the former Mahama Communications Director really had any respect for the civil and human rights of the Ghanaian people, which is precisely what Mr. Malor virulently accuses LisaRaye McCoy and those who inducted the latter as the Progress and Development Queenmother of Agona-Kwanyako of woefully lacking, the last group of the human species that the key operatives of the Mahama regime would have so cavalierly and recklessly presumed to endanger would have been the Ghanaian people. Even more risible, ironic and scandalous was the noetic or senselessly criminal decision by the Mahama Posse to issue Ghanaian passports to these flatly rejected Saudi-born citizens.
It is also significant, even as we noted in several articles and opinion pieces that we composed and published at the time, that even the United States, with arguably the most efficient or foolproof intelligence and security system, had roundly refused to have the aforesaid terror suspects, captured in the killing fields of Afghanistan, brought within one-hundred miles of the US mainland. Now, it is this veritable act of patent criminality and the flagrant and abject disregard for the civil and human rights of the Ghanaian people which we, Ghanaian citizens, ought to be talking about, and not the purely benign fact of whether Ms. McCoy gets designated or styled by her inductors as the Queen Mother of Ghana or the Queenmother of Progress and Development of the township of Agona-Kwanyako.
Then also, isn’t it rather scandalously pathetic for Ghanaian politicians who have clearly demonstrated their total lack of any regard for their nation and the general socioeconomic welfare of its people to be impugning the right of complete strangers like Ms. McCoy to laudably and admirably assume a dignified national identity which they themselves have long flatly rejected? Has Ms. McCoy taken any double salaries from the very Ghanaian taxpayers she is so avidly poised to serving with love and dignity? As well, is Ms. LisaRaye McCoy’s being invested as Progress and Development Queenmother of Agona-Kwanyako or even Ghana the most worrisome or pressing of our problems as a nation? And guess what happened to Dr. JB Danquah, the astute and erudite scholar who bestowed the name Ghana on the erstwhile Gold Coast Colony? Come on, Mr. Malor, we are not toddlers!
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]