By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
February 3, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]
I personally like the man and had also expected that he would be named to take charge of one of the traditional cabinet portfolios such as the Ministry of Information, which Mr. Dan Botwe, the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for the Okere Constituency once held under the tenure of President John Agyekum-Kufuor. But, of course, that was some 8 years ago. And this time, it is President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo who is in charge of affairs at the Jubilee-Flagstaff House. Pardon me, my countrymen and women, but I am trying to get used to the new name of Jubilee House which was given to the erstwhile Flagstaff House by the man who nearly thoroughly reconstructed the old Flagstaff House from scratch. I must quickly add that as of this writing, the Office of President Akufo-Addo had let it be known that no such name change had been effected on our presidential edifice.
At any rate, the man who has been named Minister of Regional Reorganization is, himself, not complaining, at least not publicly. And I also don’t know whether those among his constituents who are bitterly complaining have any inkling about the number of NPP members in parliament who will not get named to the posts of either senior or junior ministers, against the wishes of their constituents. Personally, though, and I stand to be corrected, I believe Mr. Botwe’s new portfolio brings him much closer to the presidency, from where he would be directly operating, than he had been under the tenure of President Agyekum-Kufuor, for example. We know this because unlike most of the other traditional ministerial portfolios, the Okere-MP would be operating directly from the same budget as that of President Akufo-Addo.
Now, what this means is that there is an unmistakable element of simpatico, what social scientists and psychologists, who, by the way, are also social scientists, call “chemistry,” between the man and his boss that may not necessarily have existed to the same degree when Mr. Botwe served previously as Mr. Kufuor’s Town-Crier. Which is not to say much, in reality, no matter how one looks at the present state of affairs in comparison to the way things were before. Indeed, listening to the views of those of his “bitching” constituents, one gets the quite quizzical impression that these critics’ minds are still set in the old mold, where being named to such major traditional portfolios as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development was facilely equated with their representative bringing home the lion’s share of the spoils of government.
What this means is that these critics and constituents of the Okere-MP have been absent-minded for quite a considerable while now, else they would have heard President Akufo-Addo say time and again that his administration is squarely about public service and sacrifice, and that any would-be executive operatives obsessed with or fixated with the profit motive and margin had better find themselves comfortable and more conducive spaces in the private-business sector. In other words, even if Nana Akufo-Addo had decided to name Mr. Botwe to one of the traditional ministerial portfolios, there is absolutely no guarantee that the holder of such office would be inordinately fixated on hauling in a disproportionate share of the proverbial spoils of public office (See “Dan Botwe Deserves Better – Group” Adomonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/3/17).
But even more significant to observe, most cabinet appointees are not known to serve out the full theoretical terms of their offices; they are constantly being shuffled around, even as those who are deemed by their boss to be woefully under-performing are let go altogether. Under President Kufuor’s tenure, for example, the now-President Akufo-Addo was shuffled from the Justice Ministry to the Foreign Ministry. In other words, as my college African Literature professor and immortalized Nigerian novelist, essayist and thinker once wrote in response to those Western chauvinist critics who thought that Africa and the African were destined to permanently subsist in a regressive state of inferiority, “It is morning yet on creation’s day.” That writer and teacher was, of course, Chinua Achebe.
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