Were he well-bonded to the truth and the factual reality of history, the diarrheal-mouthed proprietor of the Oman Communications Network and other entrepreneurial ventures in the country would have had absolutely no problem at all, whatsoever, in acknowledging that, in fact, there had been a widespread, albeit very divisive, talk among the vanguard operatives of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) about having a widely anticipated failed Candidate Adu-Boahen afforded a second, highly likely to fail, once again, shot at the Presidency, even well after the internationally renowned historian and Retired Head of the History Department at the country’s oldest and flagship tertiary academy, the University of Ghana, had been fairly, squarely and decisively trounced by an Incumbent President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, contrary to the whole cloth of mendacity that an equally royally failed Candidate Kennedy Ohene Agyapong would have supporters and sympathizers of the recently democratically ousted New Patriotic Party (NPP) believe (See “Even Adu Boahen Was Dropped as NPP Flagbearer after His Failed Attempt – Kennedy Agyapong Jabs Bawumia” Modernghana.com 6/9/25).
The truth of the matter is that even after an equally likely to fail Mr. John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor had decisively trounced Candidate Adu-Boahen in the party’s 1996 Presidential Primary, there would be a grossly misplaced haggling about having the party’s most prominent member take a second shot at the Presidency, against a far more charismatic and eloquent and strategically savvy President Rawlings. The haggling was “grossly misplaced” because short of incapacitation or human mortality, only a very naive political observer or analyst would have envisaged the remote possibility of an even more timid and rhetorically phlegmatic Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor coming within even 10-percentage points to giving an Incumbent President Rawlings the proverbial run for his money, let alone being capable of defeating a strategically more crafty and savvy de-facto strongman and the country’s longest-reigning junta leader.
The preceding controversy would further aggravate an already widely known bad blood between the now-former President Agyekum-Kufuor and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, at the time the National Electioneering -Campaign Manager of the 1992 Adu-Boahen Presidential Campaign, as Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani, the lockstepping companion and the former Chief-of-Staff of the Agyekum-Kufuor Presidency, disclosed to the media not very long ago.
You see, if the Assin-Dompim native, from the Central Region, were not implacably at loggerheads with the truth of the historical reality, Mr. Ohene Agyapong would have also soberly added the fact that the decision not to have the New Patriotic Party’s “Founding Presidential Candidate,” Prof. Albert Adu Amankwaa Boahen, gun for the presidency for the second time in 1996, was primarily and fundamentally because the veteran activist and ardent critic of the Rawlings junta had been decisively routed by a relatively younger and more physically imposing and politically far more experienced Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor in the party’s most recent presidential primary.
Well, as it shortly turned out, neither was Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor adequately savvy enough or the much-ballyhooed electoral magnet or cynosure that he had been loudly made out to be by the Kumasi Mafia Faction of the New Patriotic Party. Once again, it soon became quaintly apparent that Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor had also scandalously failed to soberly recognize the fact that running against a seasoned and a politically entrenched and well-feared and swashbuckling Incumbent President Rawlings in 1996 was absolutely in no way bound to be a cakewalk, in African American parlance, or a Sunday walk in the park, in American Mainstream speak. And that was precisely what happened, that is, a strategically scandalous and veritably preposterous proposition of epic proportions.
Now, making the sophistically absurd claim that Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor significantly outperformed Candidate Adu-Boahen in the 1996 Presidential Election, compared to the latter’s performance in 1992 against an incumbent and fire-spitting Chairman Rawlings, only exposes the abject lack of visionary thinking on the part of the infamously peevish Bawumia critic. The unarguable fact of the matter is that neither Candidate Adu-Boahen nor Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor demonstrated the sort of principled adherence to constitutional democracy required of forward-looking and progressing-thinking politicians and statesmen and women.
Ultimately what positioned the now-former President Agyekum-Kufuor for a second shot and a successful one in 2000, had to do with the fact of his decisive strategic edge and relatively superior political experience than his closest and most formidable rival among the vanguard ranks of the leadership of the proverbial Elephant Party, namely, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo who, rather strategically regressively, decided to vacuously and inordinately draw on his familial pedigree than his own personal record of achievements, besides his relatively better known and quite remarkable achievements as a firebrand human and civil rights activist and one of the most astute and successful lawyers of his generation.
You see, in terms of practical political experience, both the late Prof. Adu-Boahen and Nana Akufo-Addo fell well far off the mark, compared to Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor, who sported the enviable performance track record of having served as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia-led government of the short-lived Progress Party (PP), from 1969 to January 1972. As well, not only had Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor served as the Chief Administrator or Manager of the then Kumasi Municipal Council, presently redesignated as Kumasi Metropolitan Mayor of Ghana’s second-largest and culturally the most important city, Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor had also logged up quite considerable experience as a lawmaker or legislator of Ghana’s Third Republic as one of the most active and politically robust opposition parliamentarians.
The abject lack of such basic knowledge about the leadership profiles and the history of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition, effectively makes an obviously entrepreneurially grubby and morbidly anti-intellectual and pathologically self-absorbed Kennedy Ohene Agyapong unarguably and decidedly ill-equipped for both the leadership of the New Patriotic Party and the august Presidency of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. Which, of course, is not to necessarily imply the established qualification and/or the proven competence of each and every one of our Fourth-Republican Presidents, including the twice consecutively elected President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama.
Besides his crass arrogance and entrepreneurial braggadocio, Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, whom this writer has staunchly supported in the past, especially when the New Patriotic Party had been shunted onto the arid margins of the organized political opposition, has not absolutely in any way creditably established himself and his credentials as a formidable force to reckon with on Ghana’s Fourth Republican Political Terrain. Neither is he known to have remarkably distinguished himself as a lawmaker, vis-a-vis the crafting and passing of any quality-of-life-enhancing measures. Like the putatively richest man in the world, the White South African-born and raised Silicon Valley magnate, Mr. Elon Musk, a significant portion of the wealth of Mr. Ohene Agyapong, by his own public account and self-preening confession, derives from noncompetitive contractual awards afforded the long widely alleged former criminal suspect on the globally infamous “FBI’s List of the Most Wanted Persons” for immigration-related fraudulent activities right here in New York City.
Now, what the preceding allegation obviously means is that unwisely affording him any direct authority and control of and over the humongous human and natural resources of the nation, would only merely enable a pathologically Trumpian Transactional President Kennedy Ohene Agyapong a wide berth to unspeakably further aggravate the already dire socioeconomic plight and the dismal level and the magnitude of official corruption in the country, the likes of which may have never been witnessed throughout nearly a quarter-century of Ghana’s postcolonial history.
Which overtly and unabashedly implies that it would constitute the apogee of lunacy for any civically responsible bona fide adult Ghanaian citizen to assume that besides blindly and narcissistically lining his own pocket, wallet and bank account and those of his business associates, relatives and cronies, a President Kennedy Ohene Agyapong has absolutely nothing progressive or meaningful to offer the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian people. This middle-age man is a self-infatuated demagogue and a pathologically incurable political freeloader and nothing else or more. All Ghanaians, irrespective of religious creed or political party and ideological affiliation, had better beware of this proverbial snake-oil salesman.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
