Candidate Opoku-Agyemang’s Cheap Populist Talk Was Nothing Short of Embarrassing – Part 1

As of this writing, I had just finished reading the Full Text of the Running-Mate’s “Acceptance Speech by Prof. Naana Opoku-Agyemang” on the Presidential Ticket of Ghana’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), for the upcoming December 7, 2024, General Election and did not find anything either practically or particularly meaningful or concrete for the enlightenment of hardworking and progressive-minded Ghanaian citizens and voters looking forward to having their lives and the destiny of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana significantly improved.

The Dear Reader should not get me wrong; you see, at 70-plus-years-old, I did not expect Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang to provide highly enthusiastic and expectant Ghanaians to draw any worthwhile hope and/or confidence from this speech which the First Female Vice-Chancellor of Ghana’s Educational Flagship Academy, the University of Cape Coast, spent the better part of the past seven years composing and editing ad nauseam (See Graphic Online 4/24/24). You see, the unvarnished truth and fact of the matter is that the best days of the Elmina native, from the Central Region, are clearly well behind her.

At best, Naana Opoku-Agyemang would have been far better served by being hired or employed as a policy consultant to the 2024 John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama’s Presidential Campaign. But even on the latter count, one seriously doubts that the former Mahama-appointed Education Minister would have been able to creditably acquit herself or significantly benefit the incorrigibly Anti-Intellectual key operatives of the National Democratic Congress and the nation at large. Which was also why Yours Truly was not the least bit flabbergasted that Candidate Naana Opoku-Agyemang could not name or mention a single educational policy initiative that she had introduced to significantly improve the country's public education system that most progressive and objectively minded Ghanaian citizens could proudly point to as both the party’s and Candidate Opoku-Agyemang’s own yeomanly contribution to the intellectual and the cultural development of the country.

For, let’s get to the brass-tacks, as Americans are wont to say, the four-and-half years during which the Mahama political sidekick and Gender Token “played” Minister of Education, were also unarguably the worst period in the history of Fourth Republican Ghanaian public education. You see, it was during the tenure of this Mahama-appointed Education Minister, and the three years immediately preceding the latter period, with the now-Candidate Mahama as Vice-President to the late Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, that the United Nations-sponsored and the globally famous and prestigious Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), surveyed the quality of some 145 public school systems around the world that had Ghana scandalously ranked 145 out of all the 145 public school systems surveyed. Now, this is a very serious matter to reckon with.

It was also during this academically catastrophic period that the tandem governments of the late President Atta-Mills and the twice-defeated, one-term former President Mahama ran a historically unprecedented three-year Senior High School System, a veritable recipe for disaster and an education-policy travesty that is not practiced and has never been practiced in any of the far more industrially and technologically advanced countries and economies such as the United States of America and Canada, where Naana Opoku-Agyemang, her ex-husband and their now-adult children were partly schooled at the highest levels of academia.

The stark contrast here is that absolutely the same criminally tragic and politically murderous narrative cannot be truthfully and objectively composed and told about the present Akufo-Addo-appointed Minister of Education, namely, Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum, a man who distinguished himself as a consummate public schoolteacher of the merit-based Charter School System, right here in the United States of America, where Dr. Osei-Adutwum was awarded regional and national honors for his sterling accomplishments as a first-rate administrator prior to him being invited by the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to infuse some of his nonesuch and seminal expertise into Ghana’s public education system.

Under the tenure of Dr. Osei-Adutwum, who also doubles as the New Patriotic Party-sponsored Member of Parliament for the Bosomtwe Constituency, in the Asante Region, Ghana’s public school system has significantly improved in quality to such a wondrously phenomenal extent that even just recently, when our public high school students unprecedentedly excelled at their WASSCE exit examinations, a politically jaundiced and publicly shameless and luridly cynical Candidate Mahama was widely reported to have publicly claimed that these hardworking and intellectually well-resourced teenagers had cheated their way through their WASSCE exams. Now, can this charlatan and kleptomaniacal Ghanaian politician and sore loser be trusted to lead us into building the country which we all desire and deserve to live in? Is this a leader whom any one of us can really trust?

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 30, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]