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Opinions of Thursday, 25 April 2024

Columnist: Joseph Osei Oppong Brenya

Letter to Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang - Part 1

Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang

Dear Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang,

I hope this letter finds you well and in good spirits after yesterday’s awkwardness. By the way, I hope you had a good sleep after basking in the adulation of your usual supporters. No! In truth, I am a little amused but most honestly attentive: and perhaps wish I could think more like you. But to proceed: I allow that, with this view of the case, you could not well have chosen your illustrations from real life but a fiction of your own imagination.

Throughout my life, I have endeavoured to illustrate the various modifications to which the female politician is susceptible, with their causes and results but yours happened in a way that worries my mind. To allow yourself to be taken on a journey of dishonesty and incompetence by some people in the NDC is something I can’t sleep with. I had the thought that your life has been spent observing and thinking; you have had, as you well know, more opportunities for the first and more leisure for the last than have fallen to a lot of most.

What I have seen, felt, and thought has led me to form certain opinions of you. It appears to me that the condition of women in society as a voice of reasoning after the men have returned from their drinking spree as at present constituted is false in itself and injurious to them—that the education of women, as at present conducted, is founded in mistaken principles and tends to increase fearfully the sum of misery and error in politics; but I do not choose presumptuously to fling these opinions in the face of the world, in the form of essays on morality and treatises on education for you to stand on that platform to serve as a cover for long-held credence of incompetence of the former president, John Dramani Mahama, has really hurt my belief that women are the difference in politics.

As a mother and a grandma, you stole the opportunity to engage in an act of dishonesty and threw cold water on the pain of John Mahama’s era of pain and anguish. All that you said were contradictions of the persona of HE John Dramani Mahama you intended to paint white, which we meet on every page of history, which makes us giddy with doubt or sick with belief. I must say, Grandma, your illustration is the most poetical, I allow, but not the most just.

But tell me, is the ground you have taken sufficiently large? is the foundation you have chosen strong enough to bear the moral superstructure you raise upon it? No!

I will end here and come back with part two of my letter, I’m guided by the fact that people of my age and one that precedes me take no delight in long write-ups, a behavior that seems to have been adopted by Grandma’s age too.

My next epistle will tackle, one after the other, the issues you raised and the intellectual dishonesty you tried to engage in. Fellow Ghanaians, here we are today, attempted to be lied to by an opposition party that has no message or anything concrete, I speak with the pain of a nation betrayed and the anguish of a people ravaged whose fate in their opposition party that can offer alternative now lies in a crashed earth. But I come to you with the ultimate goodness of our countrymen, faith in our capacity to make a difference.

For a start, the world can be assured that the commitment to development and good governance is irreversible, so there is no way this country is going to allow the NDC and its affiliates or offspring to come and destroy the gains achieved over the years. Whatever it takes, whatever sacrifices it will take, all of us, chiefs and people, young and old, men and women, will rally together to prevent HE John Dramani Mahama from returning as president.

We will continue, as the national interest requires us all to reject the NDC and the cancer it presents.