Kennedy Agyapong Never Took Any Unexpected Turn, Mr. Ntarkurfah the Threepence

Reading Ebenezer Ato Ntarkurfah Jackson’s brief but grossly and scandalously misguided opinion piece titled “Kennedy Agyapong’s Unexpected Turn” (Modernghana.com 6/18/24), I kept literally falling off my chair and wondering where the author, who seemed to be very proud of his Half-Ivy Cornell University MBA Degree and Education, had been over the past two and a half decades that the publicly self-proclaimed hardnosed “Business Investor” and New Patriotic Party (NPP) stalwart has been shamelessly plying his trade of brazenly mixing humongous profit-making from NPP-government awarded contracts with Wall Street type of predatory entrepreneurial verve and zest. Mr. Ntarkurfah publicly identifies himself as an “elite insider,” so there is absolutely no reason for a veritable entrepreneurial illiterate like Yours Truly to pretend to lecture a heavyweight like “Mr. Threepence,” if I remember my childhood familiarity with Ghanaian Cedis and Pesewas accurately, here.

You see, the first shocker that any critically thinking reader of Mr. Ntarkurfah Jackson’s article is rudely confronted with is the very notion that, somehow, patently outrageous allegations made by the Assin-Central New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament against both Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, the widely presumed Next President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, and the very political party establishment on whose ticket Candidate Kennedy “Akom-Prigozhin” Ohene Agyapong was fiercely battling Vice-President Bawumia to represent the New Patriotic Party in the December 2024 Presidential Election, recently, were actually forensically proven facts. Now, that is how scandalously naïve and intellectually fluffy the critic and author of the afore-referenced opinion piece and his ilk come off to even the most casual and non-college educated reader.

And by the way, Yours Truly labels Cornell University as a “Half-Ivy” institutional establishment because historically, part of the latter well-respected and academically selective Ivory Tower establishment is also part of the State University of New York (SUNY) System, and what is called a Land-Grant Academy. I also personally have had at least a couple of my former Community College Students accepted by Cornell’s Undergraduate College as Transfer Students.

Now, what is both interesting and forensically instructive to highlight here is that unlike the allegations pertaining to the bribery and the corruption of party superdelegates made by Candidate Agyapong against the man who decisively trounced the proprietor of the Oman Media Communications Network, allegations of the bribing and the corrupting of party delegates of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), made by the opponents of the twice-defeated, one-term former President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama have nearly, each and every single one of them, proven to be forensically sustainable in any legitimately constituted court of judicature in the country, including the widely publicized embezzlement of the so-called Transportation Allowances forked up by the 2024 Mahama Presidential Campaign, conservatively estimated to tally at approximately GH₡50 million, excluding ginormous payola packages parceled out to those National Democratic Congress’ stalwarts who facilitated the deliberate rigging up of the party’s National Delegates Voters’ Register in favor of the publicly self-confessed bribe-addicted former President, that forced Dr. Kwabena Duffuor to withdraw from the party’s May 2023 Presidential Primary, by some Local and Regional Chairpersons, including the then newly elected Greater-Accra Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress.

Now, what is equally significant and interesting to spotlight here is that a soundly defeated Candidate Agyapong and/or his electioneering-campaign staff and operatives would later release press statements claiming that, in fact, like Candidate Bawumia, Candidate Agyapong had also “greased the palms of voting delegates,” and that Candidate Bawumia had decisively emerged the winner because his more formidable electioneering-campaign machinery and team had forked up more dole/dough to party delegates than had the Kennedy Agyapong Campaign machinery and team.

By the way, I often resist the temptation of writing rejoinders like the present one because most often these hip-shooting NDC hacks and paid propagandists are scandalously ill-informed on the subjects of their vacuously pontifical claims and allegations. You see, any Ghanaian-born resident and/or citizen of the United States who has been living in our beloved Mega-Union for as long as Yours Truly has or even more, is well aware of the fact that democracy is built on dollars and cents, as former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor had on several instructive occasions in the past reminded democracy-loving Ghanaians about. Democracy does not thrive in the skies or in empty space. And absolutely no serious politician in any globally recognized and respected constitutional democracy can play it stingy like Nigeria’s former Candidate Peter Obi and be triumphant.

I personally happen to have met Peter Obi in the late 1980s, while I was a student of the late Prof. Chinua Achebe and an unofficial undergraduate student of Prof. Chudi Uwazurike, an old Achebe student from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and a Doctoral-Degree Graduate in Sociology from Harvard University. As well, the very notion of John Mahama and Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang being “the true path to a better Ghana,” tells the reader more about the politically clueless mindset of Mr. Ntarkurfah Jackson than anything else. It would be laughable if the proponent of such a farcical proposition did not seem to take himself too seriously than he really needs to. I mean, on what basis is this obviously Central Regional Micro-Nationalist making such a bogus and a downright clinically cretinous proposition? You see, “There is schooling and then there is education,” as my maternal grandfather, The Rev. T H (Yawbe) Sintim (-Aboagye), of Akyem-Asiakwa and the Presbyterian Church of Ghana was fond of saying.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
June 18, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]