Sometimes You Simply Can’t Blame Kennedy Agyapong

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 4, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He has committed his fair share of blunders in the critical course and cause of setting things aright in the rough-and-tumble manner in which politics is done in the New Patriotic Party. I am, of course, talking about the fire-spitting Member of Parliament for Assin-Central, Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong. These days, though, it smartly appears that in keeping with a winsome political strategy, the tough-talking media mogul has decided to studiously heed the maxim that “Silence is Golden.” Not long ago, Mr. Agyapong was widely quoted by the media to be saying that quite a remarkable number of the key operatives of his party appeared to have cynically and shamelessly sold their consciences to some of their counterparts in the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Well, I am not here to make any direct and/or pontifical statements in staunch approbation of Mr. Agyapong who has not always creditably acquitted himself when the collective interests of party and nation, in the long haul, appeared to virulently clash with his quite humongous ego. And here, by the way, I am thinking of his rather disappointing vaunt, largely borne out of acute frustration, that he was the owner of some 108 real-estate properties and thus couldn’t care less if those whom he considered to be pathological reprobates among the top party hierarchy decided to unconscionably collaborate with their ideological adversaries to put the New Patriotic Party on the gray margins of the political irrelevance of opposition in perpetuity.

Still, you can’t blame the man when you hear and read about the Parliamentary Minority Leader and his deputy traveling Up-North to the Nadowli-Kaleo Constituency, in the Upper-West Region, to shamelessly shill for the Parliamentary Majority Leader, Mr. Alban Kingsford Sumana Bagbin, who has been known to have become a fixture in the august House since long before the birth of our Biblical Methuselah. Indeed, the Parliamentary Minority Leader, Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, has also been sneeringly dubbed the Kumasi-Suame Mugabe. And so, really, these two men may just be veritable birds of identical plumage who simply find themselves, perhaps totally by accident, on opposite sides of the aisle.

You see, it is not against any known law or statute that you cannot commend even your most inveterate political opponent once awhile when such encomium is clearly well deserved. But, of course, this ought not to become a pet political fare when your party, a government-in-waiting, is down by a humongous 24 seats and the bare-leather-worn seat of your political opponent could well serve to shorten the distance between Suame-Magazine, or even Bimbilla, and the Flagstaff House. In sum, what Messrs. Mensah-Bonsu and Dominic Nitiwul, the NPP-MP for strife-torn Bimbilla and Deputy Parliamentary Minority Leader, have been accused of doing is microcosmically tantamount to high treason.

I mean, how does one travel to a constituency in which one’s officially recognized political opponent has been comfortably hogging his seat for some two protracted decades in order to vouch for his badly battered moral and political integrity, when your own party has a legitimately elected candidate whose integrity and popularity are in dire need of marketing, and still claim to be zealously guarding the inviolable interests of the very party on whose ticket one has climbed up to whatever stature, fame and fortune one has acquired all these years?

If the preceding flagrant breach of party trust is not tantamount to political suicide, then I really don’t know what else it is. Or maybe it is simply that Messrs. Nitiwul and Mensah-Bonsu have lost whatever modicum of confidence they may have harbored for their party and its current crop of leaders? If so, then why don’t these two gentlemen step aside and make way for those who still believe that the New Patriotic Party is the party that quintupled the size of Ghana’s economy in just 8 years, under the legendary “Midas-Touch” leadership of President John Agyekum-Kufuor?

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