The Self-Important Koku Anyidoho

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

July 21, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He has been throwing his weight all over the place. And so I guess in the ramshackle scheme of Ghanaian politics, the former Atta-Mills communications director is a formidable force to reckon with. I also know that he is very disrespectful of his intellectual and social superiors, especially prominent members of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). He was even once reported to have said that the face of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor made him retch and want to throw up. And so, to be frank with you, my dear reader, I was not the least bit surprised to hear Mr. Koku Anyidoho vehemently defend himself against charges that he had bullied then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama, while Mr. Anyidoho stood in the good graces of Ghana's first democratically elected president to die in office (See "I Never Bullied President Mahama - Koku Anyidoho" Adomonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/21/15).

Whatever he did to the now-President Mahama or did not do is presently immaterial. What is quite clear to many a close observer of National Democratic Congress' political culture is that by July 24, 2012, when the boss who had made him seem bigger than he actually was expired, Mr. Anyidoho had effectively written himself out of the good books of the former Rawlings communications minister who succeeded President John Evans Atta-Mills. Whatever flair for the art of communication that the Ekumfi-Otuam native had espied in the Keta-Anloga boy was clearly missing from the playbook of the Bole-Bamboi petty chieftain. The Rawlings clansman would be sent packing out of the Flagstaff House as fast as he taken up residence in the nation's august mansion and seat of power.

We must, however, note in fairness that it was not only Mr. Anyidoho who had been widely rumored to have been disrespectful of the former vice-president. Perhaps foremost among the ranks of the wet-eared junior cabinet appointees of the Atta-Mills government that a livid Chariman Jerry John Rawlings described as "sharp-toothed babies" was Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, then-Deputy Information Minister and presently Deputy Education Minister for Tertiary Education. Fortunately or unfortunately, it well appears that Mr. Ablakwa was able to deftly and opportunely beat a retreat, temporarily and tactically recoil into his shell and emerge theatrically humbled with his tail between his legs.

I personally quite remember that in the wake of the "mysterious" passing of President Mills, when it became quite obvious to nearly every keen observer of NDC politics that most of the key players of the Atta-Mills regime were on their way out and, perhaps, back to party headquarters, a jittery Mr. Ablakwa, who had been rumored to have been at the very top of the Mahama hit list, came out to diplomatically plead for the then-Transitional President Mahama to be given ample room and independence to decide on which of the Atta-Mills cabinet appointees the new Flagstaff House Chief Resident wanted to stay on or pack up and ship out.

In retrospect, it well appears that Mr. Ablakwa's tight-rope gamble paid off remarkably. Very likely, the newly elected President Mahama did not want to publicly appear to be vindictive. He would shuffle a rapturously grateful Mr. Ablakwa to the Education Ministry, where the young ambitious politico and social climber would struggle to fit in and/or make himself relevant. Well, nearly three years later, Mr. Ablakwa still seems to be struggling to gain a comfortable foothold in his new portfolio. Even on the best of days, Mr. Ablakwa still behaves like the stentorian and rambunctious "Senior"-Deputy Information Minister that he used to be. But give it to the youngman; he is indisputably a survivor. Like the likes of Mr. Ametor Quarmyne and Ms. Anita D'Souza, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa knows where his bread is buttered and then some, as New Yorkers are wont to say.

Now, Mr. Anyidoho is back at party headquarters struggling hard to make himself relevant as one of several deputy general-secretaries of the ruling National Democratic Congress. Once awhile, the lumbering butterball emerges from under the leaden shadow of the cross-dressing Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia (aka General Mosquito), the substantive NDC General-Secretary and former Rawlings deputy cabinet appointee, to remind those who care to hear him brag, that he used to be a giant figure of substance in Ghanaian politics; and that he wasn't nearly half as cold-calculating and hostile as some of his detractors would have the world believe.

Alas, with an interminably bumbling President Mahama bent over double under the crushing weight of a national economy that had literally gone bust or haywire, it is not quite clear whether Mr. Anyidoho really regrets having been conspicuously sidelined by the man who used to be his late boss' shadowy and virtually mothballed arch-lieutenant. Indeed, the grapevine even had it that the now-President John Dramani Mahama was under investigation for a missing humongous $172 million which was alleged to be part of a contractual airplane purchase that never got accounted for. You didn't expect the bogus Apau Commission to probe this financial loss to state, or did you?

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