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

Campaigning in the great Nkawkaw township, in the Okwawu Traditional Area of the Eastern Region, recently, Vice-President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur was widely reported to have bitterly lamented the fact that the citizens of Okwawuman (aka Kwahuman) have perennially and consistently voted for the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) for most of the country’s Fourth-Republican dispensation (See “It Baffles Me that Kwahus Do Not Vote for NDC – Veep” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 9/23/16).

Vice-President Amissah-Arthur was also reported to have decried the fact that as a predominantly entrepreneurial people – that is the stereotype, of course – the Okwawus ought to have significantly recognized and expressed profuse gratitude for the fact of the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) having constructed a remarkable mileage of roadways and potable piped water for them with their votes.

Of course, this is the great lie that the diehard NDC apparatchiks and robber-barons prefer to tell each other and foolhardily preen themselves with.

The real fact of the matter is that Ghanaians of Okwawu descent are foremost among the ranks of the entrepreneurs, largely of Akan descent, who suffered untold and wanton destruction of their properties and businesses under the Rawlings-led “revolutionary” juntas of both the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the institutional parents of the ruling National Democratic Congress, both of which were also led by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, the founding-patriarch of the NDC.

It was only under the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party government that Ghanaian entrepreneurs of all ethnic backgrounds were afforded a new lease on life, in a manner they never experienced under the extortionate and tribally supremacist tenure of the proudly anti-business and anti-private enterprise Chairman Rawlings and the entire hoodlum pack and thievish leadership of the so-called National Democratic Congress and, before the latter, as already adumbrated, the faux-socialist junta of the Rawlings-chaperoned Provisional National Defense Council.

For a former Governor of the nation’s central treasury, the Bank of Ghana, and a much-touted expert economist like Mr. Amissah-Arthur to so facilely presume that it merely takes the basic construction of roads and the provision piped water to exponentially grow viable business enterprises constitutes the very height of absurdity.

And yet, this is the head of the Mahama government’s Economic Management Team (EMT) whose party would have Ghanaians believe that this cognitively languid “economic guerilla fighter” (we shall take up the latter descriptive phrase in due course) is professionally, academically and intellectually the peer and “classmate” of the Oxbridge-educated Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the three-time Vice-Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party.

Maybe somebody more socioeconomically and politically savvy like Dr. Bawumia ought to take Mr. Amissah-Arthur by the hand, like a first-grader and systematically explain to the Mahama second-bananas that it is actually the sort of foresighted free-market economic policies such as initiated by the likes of Dr. Paul Acquah and, you guessed right, Dr. Bawumia and studiously pursued by the Kufuor administration that sustainably grow businesses, not the mere construction of roads and piped water amidst the perennial and woeful lack of reliable power supply, otherwise known as Dumsor.

Then also, somebody ought to have schooled an abjectly ignorant and arrogant Mr. Amissah-Arthur about the fact that fundamentally speaking, the Akyem and the Okwawu people are culturally and genetically twin siblings.

Indeed, had he spent some worthwhile time to study the history of Okwawuman and Okyeman, Mr. Amissah-Arthur would have learned to his utter embarrassment and disappointment that Nkawkaw residents and indigenes are fairly equally of Akyem and Okwawu descent. And also that the people of Okwawu-Nkwatia and Mpraeso, for example, are originally of Akyem descent, just as are the inhabitants of the Saltpond-Anomabu townships of the Fante littoral.

In other words, the sort of nihilistic tribal games so shamelessly and orgiastically indulged by traitorous Akans and reckless political opportunists like Vice-President Amissah-Arthur will not work among principled, progressive and enlightened and fiercely self-reliant people like the Okwawu and the Akyem people, among a host of other equally enlightened Akans and their traditional allies, neighbors, friends and fellow countrymen and women.

Rather, what Mr. Amissah-Arthur ought to be asking of himself is whether politically motivated projects like the Atta-Mills Library, the Kotokouraba Market facelift and the so-called New Cape Coast Stadium are worth cheaply ceding the Fante vote and mandate to such a grossly incompetent and pathologically corrupt politician as President John Dramani Mahama.

Or the strategic and opportunistic assassination of an admittedly indisposed, but definitely not comatose, President John Evans Atta-Mills?

Come on, let’s talk about integrity and self-worth, my Fante kinsmen and women. Cut this load of rancid crap about “Swing Regions.”