Boakye Agyarko vs Frimpong Boateng

WHAT IS GOOD FOR BOAKYE AGYARKO IS GOOD FOR FRIMPONG BOATENG

Whenever men of science and men of faith meet, they often contradict each other. Sometimes they manage to arrive at the same conclusion, but that seldom happens. This is one of the sub themes explored in The King and I, an Oscar winning musical by Rogers and Hammerstein. Men in politics; the breed we have most appropriately called politicians, do not take delight in contradicting each other; rather they persistently contradict themselves, and often with careless abandon. That is why a politician will promise bread only when he knows the flour is not coming from his wife’s kitchen.

In the NPP presidential race, there is a man of science and a man of ‘faith.’ In this experiment however, the science variable, Prof Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, is not the usual ‘cause for effect laboratory weirdo’; he is the administrator of West Africa’s biggest hospital, who has a trademark to his name: the only black man to have done a heart transplant in the world. He is an internationally reputed cardiothoracic surgeon. Then he is a politician with ambition. Boakye Kyeremanteng Agyarko, the faith factor, is a man who has had a six hour friendship with death, actually pronounced dead and prepared for the mortuary, but later bouncing back to life in a Holy-Spirit-free reenactment of the biblical resurrection story, to become the Vice president of America’s oldest bank, the Bank of New York. He is a good politician, and is eyeing the presidency.

If you believe in CV’s, then already you have a president in waiting in either of the two. But these days, and especially in politics, people think above CVs. That is why John Kerry, who was touted as the ‘Resume candidate’ in the 2004 American presidential elections, could not defeat George Bush with his Vietnam War success stories. And recently, the NDC overlooked Spio Garbrah’s CV, to retain JEA Mills as flagbearer.

In this ongoing ‘what is good’ presidential drilling, I am concerned with what the aspirants represent, rather than the manifestos they preach. In our part of the world where warefarism is manna locked up in the heavens, we are used to characters who profess messianic self righteousness to save a hunger situation. And if you have observed, our politics is taking the form of crisis management than sound exchanges of ideological and philosophical positions. So if the recent Nigerian presidential elections, where nearly half of the country could not vote and about 200 voters died leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, it is because we still haven’t established what our democratic experiment represents, aside from the belief in universal adult suffrage and free speech.

I have not met any of these gentlemen before in my troubled life. In Ghana, you don’t need to have a heart problem to know that there is a physician who can virtually create a new heart for a man. Frimpong Boateng’s cardio centre had sold his name well before he decided, or perhaps was advised to transfer his knowledge of the human heart to the management of a West African country. His exploits in Germany were not as redeeming for Ghanaians as Kofi Annan’s UN breakthrough, but medical circles in Germany recognise his name. He is a nice guy with a pleasant personality, at least on television. I was nine when Boakye Agyarko was executed after Halidu Giwa’s failed 1983 coup. I never knew anything about him until he started writing his ‘Letters from America’ in the Statesman. I thought those were good letters, even though I couldn’t at the time tell what a bad letter would look like. And this is no make up. For the purpose of this exercise, I asked my contact in Ghana to mail me Agyarko’s photograph, to help me do a judgment of his face. The email mysteriously went into my junk box, though my contact’s address is saved among my known correspondents. As I tried to download the document, my Sony computer produced a strange noise that sent the machine to standby mode. When it came back to life, the picture of a man who looks like nobody I have seen before was resting on my screen. I asked my flat mate, a Jamaican, to tell me her impressions. She said there was something strange about him. He is not exactly unexciting to look at, but he is excitable in an exciting way. You want to look at him again after you have finished looking. The email said he is now Ghana’s Barack Obama. Well, I don’t know about that.

If there was ever a president called Prof. Kwabena Frimpong Boateng, how would Ghana pan out? It is tempting to think that a man who is so good with the human heart should get busy with the surgeries and leave the heartless politicians to do their job. Such an argument sounds like a fictional hypothesis, because the man is a politician. Those who know him say he started doing politics the day he learnt how to speak. And he speaks quite well: he is proficient in English, German, Ga and Twi. He belongs to the Danquah -Busia tradition and actually learnt at the feet of his Progress Party guru grandfather.

When you hear him say things like: ‘too much politicization will break the nation and stagnate the country’s efforts on institutionalizing certain progressive changes,’ you know he is a pragmatic visionary who is not coming with an ideological baggage. Even so, his political brain has not mixed up with the laboratory concoctions; he has a message, and it is clear: poverty alleviation. But, he does what all politicians do: sweet rhetoric. So he professes to alleviate poverty by introducing ‘innovations in food production, water, energy and health provision and in general economic growth.’

Innovation in economic growth! It sounds a mouthful, but at least it is ambitious than the cliché ‘move the nation forward.’ It appears he knows what he is talking about. He has transformed Korle Bu from a ‘graveyard’ to a good medical facility, the third largest in all of Africa. His Ostrich farm, the first in Ghana, is not his only innovation; he is credited with designing a chest drainage system in Ghana. The Ghana Heart Foundation is his creation and it is doing fine. If he is a weirdo, perhaps it is only in the admirable sense that he prefers to grow what he eats, so he is very particular about his garden.

Frimpong Boateng’s main strength is the dynamic doer persona he has cut for himself. Because he doesn’t come across as a typical politician, you can trust him. When you look at him, what you see is a tantalizing combination of credit and talent, all graciously cascading into a waterfall of hope and promise. And his humble, simple exterior seems to support what you perceive. He wouldn’t be difficult to market, but will they buy him?

His problem is the fine medical man that he is. Perhaps, if he hadn’t been associated with Korle Bu, we would have found it easier to test him for president than now. The Korle Bu fortune hangs around his neck, and you want him to spend it there. He doesn’t strike you as the kind of man made for the predictable unpredictability of African politics. He is true NPP but you wonder if he would have come across differently if he went solo.

What about President Boakye Agyarko? At once, you see a tested product of liberal metropolitan elitism, and a dutiful patriot who represents a fresher version of an old promise. He is neither a minister-aspirant nor an ex-minister-aspirant, but his candidacy introduces an intriguing element that quickly extinguishes the ‘where from him?’ puzzle. So he asks other presidential hopefuls: ‘what is it that you want to do differently that you do not have the opportunity to do now?’ If this was a campaign message, it would sell, and it seems is it helping his course very much. It is a good question everyday.

The ‘proclaim and claim’ politics of the 21st century often sees strangers to a tradition claiming to be founding fathers. When Agyarko says he is a founding member of the NPP, it is the substance of his membership that impresses you than his person. If a party professes newness in patriotism (New Patriotic Party), her members must be patriotic. And Agyarko lives this truism. He has ever paid the salaries of administrative staff at the NPP head office. If the NPP ever had a monitoring centre for the 2000 elections that won them the presidency, it is because Agyarko had out of his own financial resources rented and furnished the entire top floor of a hot property in Accra, for the use of NPP MPs. He is said to have adopted the central regional secretariat of the NPP at a time, providing it with a 5Million cedis monthly seed, for the secretariat’s capacity development.

When I said CVs don’t sell very much in today’s politics, I was talking about CVs that wouldn’t sell anywhere anyway. But when you hear that a Ghanaian is the Vice president of an American bank, you know you have an important treasure, and if you would sell it, there will be ready buyers. Even so, he knows big CVs could be just as limiting as stolen certificates; he invests his talents in other ventures. He may not have written a book, but writing a weekly newspaper column for a 5 year period is a pain any author will share.

Agyarko’s main strength seems to be the quality of the man in him. You don’t see a manicured personality; instead you are confronted with a character whose ascent to grace has been made fresher by the grass from which his humility grows. He represents the redeeming metaphors that are often identifiable in people of promise. You can sympathise with him, because of his rare testimony. And the fact that he has not decidedly made the ‘resurrection story’ his twin person, makes him worthy of your trust.

But he still suffers the ‘where from him?’ problem, even though his influence is supreme. If he is able to overcome that hurdle, he may also have to, perhaps more than any body else, answer the all important ‘why him?’ question. You have no reason to doubt that he is sitting on ability and grace, but you want to know when he started preparing himself for the most gracious. He is a bit of a puzzle, just like the Obama they say he is.