I am still trying to recover from my obstreperous conniption over the fact that Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong would actually stand in the middle of the Asante-Mampong Municipality, the very township of my birth, scarcely a year after his own in another place and town, and so cavalierly presume to insult the intelligence of not only the good people of the globally renowned Silver Stool, only second to the Asanteman Golden Stool, by peevishly and rather insolently disparaging and impugning the credibility of unarguably the most strategically instrumental party stalwart behind the two resonant consecutive electoral success stories of the recently democratically deposed Akufo-Addo-led and the Mahamudu Bawumia-chaperoned institutional establishment of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) – (See “Even Adu Boahen Was Dropped as NPP Flagbearer After His Failed Attempt – Ken Agyapong Jabs Bawumia” Modernghana.com 6/9/25).
Any by the way, Asante-Mampong is not only the birthplace of Yours Truly; even more significantly, it is also the bona fide ancestral moorings and cradle of the clerically immortalized Rev. T. H. (Yawbe) Sintim-Aboagye of Akyem-Asiakwa and Akyem-Begoro, who much better preferred, first and foremost,” to be known and called “Osofo Sintim of The Presbyterian Church of Ghana.”
The eldest son of Nana Kwadwo Aboagye, of Asante-Juaben, officially recognized as a vanguard pillar in the introduction and the spread of Presbyterianism in the Kingdom of Akyem-Abuakwa, was a bona heir and claimant of the Asante-Mampong Silver Stool, having also been brought forth by Nanabaapanyin and Odehye Akosua Baaduaa – aka Awo Baaduaa – the youngest sibling and sister of Daasebre Odeefuo Nana Amaniampong, I. Nana Baaduaa transitioned into the ages or eternity in 1931, when Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong’s own Assin native father had not even yet been conceived.
And for good measure, it would interest the former Assin-North and, subsequently, the Assin-Central Member of Parliament on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party, to also be calmly and soberly schooled about the fact that it was The Rev. Theodore Henry Yawbe Sintim-Aboagye who established a fully-fledged Asante-Mampong Presbyterian Primary and Middle Schools, from when he opportunely and auspiciously assumed principalship or “headteachership” of the then Classes 1 to 3. The school had been recently abandoned by a predecessor who decided that pioneering the Asante-Mampong Presbyterian Primary School into a full-fledged Standards 1 to or through 3, that is Classes/Primary 4 through 6 was a thankless task that was not worthy of his efforts. The ultimately “Rejected Son” of both Kumasi-Adum Township and Asante Mampong would devoutly and diligently stay the course and literally pioneer the redemption and the glorious elevation of his ancestral township as a major national hub of Western-Missionary Education in the Twentieth Century.
I would be born and delivered by a young and handsome British doctor at Saint Andrews Hospital who, according to my beloved late mother, described Yours Truly as “A fine little man who was bound for great things.” Now, the ultimate judgment is for both my peers and posterity to make. I have “No Fucking Money” to pride and preen myself about and/or over, unlike the other self-infatuated and power-intoxicated Kwame, but I definitely am no mendicant when it comes to assessing the weight and the value of genuine leadership and patriotic statesmanship and, of course, stateswomanmanship as well, when it comes to the same.
Now, I laboriousness and elaborately recount the preceding familial biography, obviously, as a means of not only establishing my unimpugnable authority and credibility in these matters but, even more significantly, to definitively establish the fact that hereabouts in Ghana – or perhaps more appropriately, thereabouts in Ghana – we have the real and the veritable nation-builders; and then we have all the other blowhard blunderbusses and brazen kleptocratic opportunists who would have the rest of us sit duck while they luridly masturbated in morbid self-glorification before the august institutional establishment of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo-inspired New Patriotic Party and the rest of the nation at large. Among our people, we have a dictum that runs tersely as follows: “A good bead does not advertise itself.”
The incontrovertible fact and truth of the matter is that the entire decision by the leadership of the then newly formed New Patriotic Party (NPP) was decidedly a strategically unprepossessing proposition that was irredeemably Dead-On-Arrival (DOA), as was also the patently equally grossly ill-conceived decision by then-Candidate John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor to quixotically contest the then recently redesignated President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings in the 1996 Presidential Election.
You see, venturing into the US President William “Bill” Jefferson Blythe Clinton and the Busumuru Kofi Atta-Annan-inspired Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Dispensation, the most politically and strategically apt thing to do ought to have been for the country’s organized opposition leaders to have pre-conditionally demanded the establishment of an Interim or Transitional Government, preferably, one that was Headed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG), while a strategically and suavely civilianized and a diehard opportunistic former Airforce Flight-Lieutenant turned career politician was effectively defanged as a surefire means of guaranteeing a level playing field, as Americans are wont to say.
Predictably, none of the preceding politically progressive measures were taken, obviously because the long-famished megalomaniacal and parochially minded leadership of the New Patriotic Party was inordinately intoxicated with the very ideational power-grab chimera of ready access to fame and fortune of a thoroughgoing corrupt political culture to think straight or reason soberly. Consequently, the patently lame argument that the late Prof. Albert A. Adu-Boahen had been dropped or disallowed from contesting for the Presidency, the second time around, because the Akyem-Osiem and the Asante-Juaben native had performed poorly against an incumbent Strongman-Candidate Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings is simply inexcusably absurd.
The preceding is the kind of Ananse Fabular Narrative that would make perfect sense to only first-grade pupils. And this is precisely the tack of paralogia and paralogism adopted by the royally failed contestant for the New Patriotic Party’s 2024 Presidential Nomination. And it is squarely predicated upon the foregoing observation that Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong cannot and must not be facilely let off the hook, as it were, for witheringly and inexcusably insulting the intelligence of the good and the forward-looking citizens and residents of Asante-Mampong and, to be certain, the nation at large.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
