Condescending Personal Letters Ought to be Truthful, At the Very Least
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
After execrably, invidiously and heretically and unsuccessfully attempting to trash the image, worth and personality of Nana Akufo-Addo, a man whose name of "Dankwa" this disaffected "internal enemy" cannot even spell, the Treasure Hunter has resorted to another equally tacky and lurid tack - this time around, it is to predictably pretend as if his is an objective voice of reason, which is what makes his so-called personal missive all the more detestable and unpardonably uncouth.
And here, also, as before, he is bound to epically fail. For whatever tenuous semblance of credibility he may have had in the recent past, even as suspiciously opportunistic as it clearly might have been, has effectively and irreparably evaporated.
Once again, and predictably, the Treasure Hunter is fatuously attempting to rehash the infamous patently Intra-Asante political events of 1979, in which the late Gen. A. A. Afrifa, a bona fide first-class Asante citizen and a first-rate Sandhurst-educated Ghanaian soldier, founded the United National Convention (UNC) and desperately coralled Mr. William "Paa Willie" Ofori-Atta as its avuncular Presidential Candidate.
In sum, the UNC was not an Akyem political party, as Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor and his associates have been wistfully and vindictively peddling. One only needs to read the former president's biographical work, Between Faith And History, to fully appreciate the curious and historically unorthodox provenance of such vicious mendacity.
Another stalwart of the UNC was Mr. R. R. Amponsah, the bravest and greatest Asante among the United Party (UP) leaders; and so what is all this nonsense about Paa Willie and the UNC-PFP divide being quintessentially an Akyem mintage? You see, my own late father, who used to intimately socialize within the Asante community, both in Ghana and here in New York City, and a former libator for the Amansie Association of New York, the first of its kind hereabouts (he would be later forced out for being a non-Asante), and whose own parents and grandparents were of Asante-Dwaben stock (it does not get any more Asante than this), was fond of the following saying which many a non-Asante Akan-descended Ghanaian would readily recognize: "Asantefo, Yereko a Ase Y'ene Wo Na Ereko," to wit, you always have to watch your back when you are in the company of Asantes. Maybe the Treasure Hunter will do well to explain such Asante notoriety, even among Akans, to the rest of us.
We must also emphasize the fact that the UNC was a far more ethnically inclusive political organization, albeit with a remarkably smaller following and membership, than the Victor Owusu-led Popular-Front Party, having garnered five (5) of the then-fifteen (15) parliamentary seats in the Volta Region, to Mr. Owusu's zilch/zip number of seats in the same region. We need to also highlight, for the benefit of the crassly ignorant Treasure Hunter, that both Messrs. Afrifa and Amponsah's great animosity for Victor Owusu directly emanated from the fact of the latter's desertion of the Danquah-led United Gold Coast Convention for the Nkrumah-led so-called Convention People's Party.
Mr. Owusu, ever the maverick political operative, would later shamelessly and opportunistically beat back a nettlesome path of retreat, but by then his credibility and trustworthiness had effectively evaporated. The Treasure Hunter may also do himself and his readers some teachable good by exploring the rancorous professional and political relationship between Justice Adade, recently deceased, and another first-rate bona fide Asante legal wit, and Mr. Victor Owusu and report back on the same.
You see, condescending to Nana Akufo-Addo is very typical of the Treasure Hunter and his kind. I personally find it to be too inexcusably uncouth and irredeemably illiterate to expatiate on the same at this time; besides, I have far better things to do than chase tails with an incorrigible reprobate. Suffice it, however, to observe that when he ran for President on the ticket of the Popular-Front Party in 1979, Mr. Victor Owusu was a 59-year-old man shamelessly cohabiting with a 19-year-old woman, a woman younger than almost every one of the candidate's own children.
As I see it, the problem of our Treasure Hunter and his fellow desperadoes is that they presumptuously envisage themselves to wield the power to determine the shape and destiny of the political fortunes of Nana Akufo-Addo in Fourth Republican Ghanaian political culture. Well, I have news for them: you played absolutely no major role in the making of Nana Akufo-Addo, and you are going to have no part in breaking him and his career down. That belongs to the great delegates of the New Patriotic Party whose intelligence you have already insulted and impugned, by presuming them to be so superficial as to cast their ballot on the basis of which candidate is tallest in physique and most appealing in looks, rather than most intelligent, loyal to the party and visionary. And then to the larger community of the Ghanaian electorate. And, of course, Divine Providence.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 27, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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