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Opinions of Saturday, 8 April 2017

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

Kennedy Agyapong is the biggest threat to National Security

Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, MP for Assin Central Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, MP for Assin Central

“This person [Kennedy Agyapong] is supposed to be an honorable MP and consistently he comes up with statements, rantings and ravings that make us question how he got there in the first place…” (Angela Dwamena Aboagye, Executive Director of the Ark Foundation).

KENNEDY AGYAPONG IS A MAJOR NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT

Kennedy Agyapong, the present Member of Parliament for the Assin North Constituency, recently demonstrated another shameful act of gross unprofessionalism and unguarded thoughtlessness of cultural primitivism when he referred to the face of a television host as “bofrot.”

Ken is indeed a classic study case in national disgrace.

What is really wrong with this empty vessel, a creature whose own face looks like a leatherface-harmattan mask, a Halloween mask?

A Trumpian political buffoon and slothful milquetoast, Ken’s tired and outworn and broken faces are a comical synonym for a congealed banana republic.

This dated comedian who calls himself “politician” presents with a classic symptomatology of what the eminent economist, philosopher, mathematician, historian and writer appropriately calls “mental murder,” “cognitive imbecility,” and “irreducible ignorance.”

How else could he be described?

This comic exaggeration of a Zika-infested microcephalous public figure has reportedly insulted everyone in his party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), calling party members “stupid” and “fool.”

This blanket insulting descriptions covered the leadership of the party itself, including Akufo-Addo, who once respectfully addressed this existential anomaly of human clone as “the redoubtable.” Thus he says of Ken in part:

“Using the structures of the party to deal with the problems of the party is what we have to do. So I am asking everybody to respect that even senior members of the party like the redoubtable Kennedy Agyapong, I am pleading with him…”

Pleading with him rather than petitioning the party’s leadership to use the party’s internal structures to sanction him?

Monetization of Ghanaian politics has given this undignified grotesque caricature of a village champion a voice he will otherwise not have had amongst great, intelligent men and women of exceptional character.

How multiparty democracy and politics and money have reduced members of the ruling class to prisoners of mediocrity and of the underserving political quackery of social animals like Ken, a political proband of sorts!

This mad dog of a rabid politician, who is widely known for punctuating his public political communication with crude insults and unguarded buffoonery, asymptotically approximates our shameless though popular tendency to celebrate mediocrity.

Only in Kennedy Agyapong’s Ghana!

Allegedly a big financier of the ruling party, Ken has stopped at nothing including holding this party and the nation to ransom on the basis of his privileged standing in this criminal political organization of ethnocentric hegemonists.

Like an agitated and restive croaking frog, and a female dog in heat too, he hops from one local television and radio station to another just for the sake of making wild allegations, of casting memorable aspersions at his imagined political enemies, and in the process barking scandalously also like the public dog he is, he spreads saliva aerosol and corpse flies in studios.

He reportedly claims to be in possession of a stash of incontrovertible evidence for some of the major instances of public corruption committed in the country yet, unlike the more intelligent and politically savvy and knowledgeable Martin Amidu, he sits his burning, tingling political hemorrhoids on this mountain of evidence and refuses to bring qui tam lawsuits against those suspected scheming, high-profile corruptocrats.

Again, at one point he says the National Democratic Congress (NDC) reportedly has dispatched assassins to take his life when, in fact, this narrative could be a political dream of a schizo or a psycho, a narcissistic public dog running after its tangled tail in endless concentric circles of mental instability.

Ken, Bob Marley’s “Crazy Baldhead,” loves to do Azonto with Geto Boys’ classic rap song “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” and Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”

This grossly unrefined Ken is a public nuisance, a professional pollutant, a disgusting liability to common sense.

He is also a notably bad example to Ghanaian and African youth, a bad role model for that matter who needs to be quarantined in an insane asylum for the safety of his colleague parliamentarians and Ghanaians at large.

In one sense therefore, Ken is a patronizing catalyzer of internal colonialism via his angry, violent outbursts and schadenfreude politics—both of which have no place in any civilized society. Wole Soyinka was right to note:

“the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it.”

In the main though, why Akufo-Addo cannot seem to clip the wings of this phallocentric misogynist, flightless dinosaur is all too clear—as implied elsewhere.

In other words Akufo-Addo’s hand is in the poisonous mouthparts of Ken, and he cannot bring himself to bite it.

Akufo-Addo cannot bite the hand that is feeding him, model instantiation of political realism and convenience.

Nevertheless, the president is not alone in this regard. Listen to what Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu too, an MP, also has to say about Ken:

“He has good content but it doesn’t come across very well…unfortunately sometimes the way he comes across is not the best, so he should watch it…”

Good content, like open defecation?

What is “good content” in Ghanaian politics extreme partisan politics, kleptomania or institutional corruption?

Has there ever been “good content” in Ken’s microcephalus prosthetic head apart from his trademark rhetoric of vigilante vulgarity leveled against more intelligent and powerful women?

Don’t we all know Ken has a “bofrot” mind? And the grotesque face of a laughing hyena?

Ken’s prosthetic head is a landfill of open defecation. No wonder the barking public dog hates “nerd glasses” with passion!

Ken’s undisciplined, diarrheic tongue is partly because of the undue pampering he enjoys from the party’s leadership and unenlightened Ghanaians.

No intelligent person will see “good content” in this man’s moral and political characterology.

This man therefore represents everything that is objectionable in the character of the humanity of our post-Nkrumah politicians.

Of course, we are not reducing our critique of Ken to the question of essentialism. It is more complicated than that, for he is his own enemy.

Yet he, neither an astute or maverick politician, and Akufo-Addo inhabit a Machiavellian mutual space of vigilante violence and ethnocentric hegemonism.

When one is not busy inciting Asantes to reduce the humanity of Gas and Ewes to the indictable ashes of the Rwandan Genocide and threatening national security officials, the other is preaching brimstone-and-fire Yen Akanfuo and All-Die-Be-Die on the bully pulpit of political theology.

Both are the Frankenstein faces of the Invincible Forces and Delta Force—the essence of vigilante violence in modern Ghanaian politics.

And both are political Frankenstein monsters.

While Akufo-Addo is promising to contain these vigilante groups, Ken has reportedly been daring the latter and his ministerial appointees to try it.

Both have been using the same language to convey their intentions to the public nonetheless, the language of political deception.

Ken, the kwashiorkor face of a broken piece of dilapidated furniture, and Akufo-Addo are the same then, the same in that the former has merely been repeating the latter’s policy position on the vigilante groups—which is to leave them to operate freely in accordance with the party’s secret All-Die-Be-Die Manifesto.

Ken is indeed, a cannibalistic Trumpian wild boar. Ken, an apoptotic enemy of the state and its open-defecation democracy, is beyond the pale of moral passivation.

And, of course, no one believed us when we once wrote that Akufo-Addo was a deadly political cannibal and his vigilante seeds, politically autosarcophagic. “Political strategy,” Bob Marley once aptly described this dangerous political trend on the track “Ambush in the Night.” Listen:

“See them fighting for power
“But they know not the hour

“So they bribing with their guns, spare-parts and money…

“‘Cause every time they can reach us, through political strategy…

“Your brother got to be your enemy…

The above notwithstanding, it does appear that at the end of the day Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu could still be right about Ken:

“He has good content but it doesn’t come across very well…unfortunately sometimes the way he comes across is not the best, so he should watch it…”

But Ken does not have to “watch it”!

This is because his absolute, spirited defense of the Invincible Forces and the Delta Force and their vigilante intimation of Ghanaians probably enjoys Akufo-Addo’s imprimatur.

Still, unlike Akufo-Addo though, Ken’s may not have come across the best way. Has he betrayed Akufo-Addo then?

Yes!

Political Siamese Twins both indeed are, diabolical hypocrites and moral, political frauds—to say the least.

With such persons in positions of authority, no wonder Ghana is far below the dangerous depths of “Down Under.”

Ask Australia’s rock band “Men at Work”!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: SOME CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

“Vigilante groups such as Invincible Forces, Delta Forces and the rest were made to believe to hold the final authority in the scheme of internal affairs.

“He said, ‘mark this down, the country will experience more violent attacks ahead of the appointment of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives.’

“I blame these acts on leadership failure which predates the electioneering activities and how the party used these boys in their internal disputes.

“Believe me, these attacks are just a tip of the iceberg and I’m telling you to wait until we begin hearing announcement of MMDCEs in the next two or three weeks” (Dr. Charles Marfo, “Expect More Attacks in NPP Soon—University Dean,” Ghanaweb, April 5, 2017)

To the extent that Ken is even an MP and a legislator prompts one to wonder whether there are no respectable and respectful, tecnocratically and diplomatically knowledgeable, well-spoken, intelligent and decent men and women with well-rounded education and dignified carriage in his constituency.

But then again, a closer look at the public profile of Ken provides an edifying vista of the Ghanaian parliament as a hopelessly useless, morally rotten and bankrupt arm of government. Ghana’s continued arrested development is partly due to the continued existence of this non-august institution.

Ken is an epitomic index case of institutional decay. This man whose policy rhetoric and knowledge of public policy is not informed by any deep, serious knowledge of polemology and the political history of Africa, also may not grasp the full spectrum of the national security implications of the vigilante threat which the Invincible Forces and the Delta Force represent in the Ghanaian body politic. He may have to closely read Soyinka’s “Of Africa” and “The Open Sore of a Continent” to catch the faintest inkling of the complex issues we are discussing here.

He has, most significantly, reportedly publicly admitted to administering financial and other logistical assistance to some of these vigilante groups during the 2016 general elections, in stark yet indirect contravention of one of the underlying pillars of the national constitution which says in part:

“The 1992 Constitution of Ghana, which is the supreme law of the land, stipulates in Articles 200 (2) and 210 (2) that no person or authority shall raise any private army, police force or militia except by or on the authority of an Act of Parliament.”

That is, providing logistical and financial assistance to these vigilante groups is as constitutionally objectionable as raising them. Nigerian politicians, intelligence and national security officials have done and continue to do somewhat similarly, with these unpatriotic men and women secretly supporting and hobnobbing with Boko Haram by providing it with intelligence reports on when the national army is going to attack it, while publicly denouncing the group. Also the United States, Paul Kagame’s Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda have been playing similar tactics with M23, of the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

We see these seeming policy contradictions in the ideological conflation of Akufo-Addo and Ken. What this duo is in effect doing, is playing a tactical zero-sum politics between themselves and with Ghanaians. This convenient game theory of political deception will undo the government in power if the headship does not reverse the current instances of political and leadership inaction.

Yet Ken keeps egging these vigilante groups on, while National Security Minister Albert K. Dapaah is playing ostrich, with the latter claiming these vigilante groups don’t exist because they are not registered—as though armed robbers in the country are registered to operate. With a heavy heart, we condemn in no uncertain terms the wayward behavior of the Delta Force whose members allegedly stormed the Kumasi Circuit Court, freed those of their colleagues on trial, disturbed public peace, vandalized court properties, and nearly lynched the sitting judge—Mary Senkyere.

However, until Akufo-Addo puts his determined policy intentions to nip the vigilante groups in the bud in action, we will continue to take his public rhetoric in this sensitive national security matter with a grain of salt—as a mark of Machiavellian superficiality.

CLOSING REMARKS

On the other hand to the extent that Ken is not demonstrating a deep intellectual understanding of, or even familiarity with, the dire policy implications of these vigilante groups for national security and political stability, is indeed cause for alarm in that his uninformed views on national security matters may tacitly be contributing to the foundational formation, or genesis, of a potential civil war.

And whether naïve realism or the curse of knowledge is the sole reason we cannot seem to get through the crude concreteness of Ken, is a serious experimental question for psychiatrists and cognitive psychologists to explore further. Even so to think of him as a legislator is both disheartening and frightening.

This naked psycho who represents the face of a psittacine chatterbox, also of a broken gramophone record, threatened to end his life on national television by drinking the well-known Shakespearean cup of poison if he does not succeed in sending Ibrahim Mahama to prison, but after grossly misreading Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” he sends six of his own men to assassinate him.

He ends up snuffing out the life of three of these euthanasic assassins and blaming it on his political opponents in the NDC. The next day it is members of his own party who want to kill him. Is it because he does not know how to commit suicide, how to hang himself? Has Ken ever heard of “The Dog Suicide Bridge”? This dangerous politician, who represents the true face of perseverative cognition, is the hopeful dream of a public dog infatuated with the clinical politics of Asperger’s Syndrome. Ken is a “sick” public figure whose actions and inactions are causing problems for the country. The change Akufo-Addo promised Ghanaians is gradually turning out to be an elephantine hoax. These politicians are holding the nation to ransom for all the wrong reasons.

In the meantime we have to admit that Ghana is dying slowly due to the actions and inactions of our politicians, more particularly so when, for instance, we have Kumasi-based village champions like Chairman Wontumi saying the useful and village idiots of the Delta Force and the Invincible Forces are “good boys.”

Ghana is not for political thugs and gangs, not for men and women who see the country as their personal property and therefore they must do with it as they expressly wish, because for far too long we have allowed the elements of morose delectation and unsympathetic joy to eat away at the beautiful soul of this once great nation founded by none other than Kwame Nkrumah.

Neither is Ghana Ken’s. Even his volte-face, condemnatory appraisal, and indictment of the Delta Force in the wake of its daring usurpation of authority are a complete hypocritical farce. His public praise for and endorsement of the group, his consistent attacks upon the “professional” integrity of our national security and public officials who dared to question the vigilante tactics and operational unofficiality of the group emboldened it, probably contributing to the group’s most recent act of blatant usurpation of the people’s authority.

Still, Ken should be arrested immediately, thoroughly debriefed and investigated for his possible ties to these criminal vigilante organizations as he may know more about their inner workings than he is letting out. In fact he may be in cahoots with them to sabotage, and therefore make unpopular, this government for having been passed over for a major cabinet position in the sitting government.

Jealousy, personal rivalries, clash of egos, and intra-partisan settling of scores may be fueling this trendy political game of renewed, or intermittent, policy and ideological conflicts. Thus in this general regard, his undying love and confident expressions of filial piety for Akufo-Addo may all be strategic smokescreens. Ken could as well have been using the climate of fear to register his frustrations, something he may have gleaned from the mafia playbooks “The Godfather” and “The Sicilian,” both authored by Mario Puzo, and from Soyinka’s 2004 Reith Lectures “Climate of Fear.” Ghana is teetering on the brink of social collapse, of political bankruptcy.

Incompetent Ken is therefore a major threat to national security, not a mad genius but a clinically ill political cartoon, a schadenfreude moirologist whose crocodile tears the base instincts in the worst of human clones savors. Ken truly fits Max Romeo’s “Chase the Devil.” But all is not lost yet. Our dear good friend Dr. Dompere has excellent answers for these wayward and clueless politicians (see the following works of scientific, mathematical and philosophical profundity):

• “The Theory of Categorial Conversion: Rational Foundations of Nkrumaism in Socio-natural Systemicity and Complexity.”

• “The Theory of Philosophical Consciencism: Practice Foundations of Nkrumaism in Social Systemicity.”

We shall return…

REFERENCES

Ghanaweb. “Kan-Dapaah Is A ‘Disaster’— Kennedy Agyapong.” April 7, 2017.

Ghanaweb. “Delta Force Members Are ‘Good Boys’— Chairman Wontumi.” April 7, 2017.

Ghanaweb. “BNI Warns Akufo-Addo To Withdraw Nominee.” April 7, 2017.