Who could be more Tribalistic than Koku Anyidoho?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 18, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Shortly after he was elected Deputy General-Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Koku Anyidoho was widely reported to have called on the Anlo-Ewe residents of the Volta Region to capitalize on his new position to demand more development projects for their part of the region that has been nicknamed the Electoral World Bank of the National Democratic Congress. And so it is very annoying for Mr. Anyidoho to be accusing both the Okyenhene and the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) of tribalism (See “Okyenhene Goofed! There is more Dev’t in Akyem under NDC than under NPP – Koku” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 1/18/16).

We must also not forget that Mr. Anyidoho is the nephew of the late Prof. Kofi Awoonor, the infamous inventor and agitprop tout of “Revolutionary Tribalism” in postcolonial Ghana. At a University of Ghana forum organized to discuss ways and means of creating a cohesive sense of national identity among all Ghanaians, during the Acheampong regime in the early 1970s, irrespective of ethnicity and / or cultural backgrounds, Prof. Awoonor was widely reported to have mounted the podium and unabashedly horrified well-meaning Ghanaian scholars and intellectuals by intemperately declaring as follows: “I am first and foremost an Ewe before a Ghanaian.”

Awoonor would later farcically claim that he had spent most of his adult life and career promoting pan-Africanist causes. Now, isn’t it strange that Mr. Anyidoho would virulently impugn the Okyenhene’s assertion that under the Mahama / Amissah-Arthur government, there has been little recognizable material development of Akyem-Abuakwa and yet be unable to point to a single substantive project in the sub-region to back up his argument?

Rather, the former Atta-Mills Communications Director would have Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin, II, tally up, collate and compare development projects undertaken by the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Akyem-Abuakwa, while Nana Akufo-Addo served as a cabinet appointee, with those purportedly undertaken by the National Democratic Congress under the tenure of Messrs. Mills and Mahama, and presently Mahama and Amissah-Arthur.

Indeed, I may not necessarily agree with the Okyenhene on the need of having a specific government appointee from his area speak on behalf of and to the development needs of the people of Akyem-Abuakwa. Nevertheless, going by his own fervidly pro-Ewe logic, it cannot be rationally argued that, somehow, the Okyenhene grossly erred in wanting some of the same things from the government that Mr. Anyidoho has been pontifically counseling his Anlo-Ewe tribesmen and women to demand. In other words, it is inexcusably offensive for Mr. Anyidoho to think that what is good for the goose ought not to be good for the gander.

The NDC scribal second-bananas also accuses Nana Akufo-Addo of having constituted an Akyem cabal within the NPP which seeks to ostracize members of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, but Mr. Anyidoho woefully and scandalously fails to explain to the rest of the nation why the Anlo-Ewes vote pathologically and exclusively NDC, and also organize bands of thugs to persecute and terrorize Anlo-Ewe members and staunch supporters of the New Patriotic Party.

Then also, Mr. Anyidoho has yet to explain the regular conferences that Ewe cabinet appointees in the NDC hold at the private residence of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings. By all means, let those who live in straw huts not resort to the dangerous game of flame-throwing.

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