Somebody from the camp of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) did not do his/her homework well; which was why last month when they decided that they needed to select a running-mate to pair up with Mr. Ivor Kobina Greenstreet, the 2016 presidential candidate of the one political party that claims direct descent from Independent Ghana’s first president, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, they curiously settled on Mr. Gabriel Nsiah Nketiah, a career diplomat and former Ghana’s Ambassador to one of the Koreas (or both?) and a card-carrying member of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), as their most fetching choice (See “I’m Still NPP – CPP Running-Mate” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/12/16).
As of this writing (11/12/16), it was not clear to this writer whether Nana Nsiah Nketiah had renounced his card-carrying membership of the Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party. The rump-CPP’s Vice-Presidential Candidate also claims that there is ample precedent of such ideological carpet-crossing to legitimize his decision to play second-bananas to Mr. Greenstreet, and names the late Vice-President Ekwow Nkensen Arkaah as a striking example of a politician who was once courted by former President John Agyekum-Kufuor as a possible running-mate, shortly after the latter was nominated as the presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party.
That must have been around 1998, about the same time that Chairman Jerry John Rawlings was being widely rumored to have accepted the whopping payola sum of some $ 5 million from Nigerian strongman Gen. Sani Abacha, in order to do some global public relations face-lift for the notorious megalomaniacal tyrant, largely before a plenary session of the United Nations’ General Assembly. Those who remember the most salient events of this period claim that the then-Ghanaian strongman had acquitted himself quite creditably, even if such ignoble and blind shilling for the Nigerian strongman and mega-kleptocrat had not redounded positively in favor of Ghana’s image within the global community, except, of course, the budgetary ledger of Chairman Rawlings and his closest associates and hangers-on.
Well, the upshot of it all is that Mr. Arkaah, late, never became the running-mate of then-Candidate John Agyekum-Kufuor. That noble mantle would be gracefully decked by Alhaji Aliu Mahama, of blessed memory. Objectively speaking, however, political bisexuality may well be more of the norm than the aberration in the decidedly septic political art in our portion of the globe. We must also quickly interject here the fact that at the time of his purportedly avid courting by then-Candidate Kufuor, the Harvard-educated Mr. Arkaah had just been afforded the heave-ho by Chairman Rawlings, after having deftly and successfully used the Fante Senya-Breku native to enable him win the lion’s share of the votes of the putative swing enclave of the Central Region and be elected to his first of two terms as a democratically elected President of Ghana, and the first democratically elected leader of the country’s Fourth Republic.
Thus, when then-Candidate Kufuor allegedly called on Mr. Arkaah, the latter was effectively damaged goods; and so it is not clear, other than the fact of using Mr. Arkaah as an obvious political nuisance to Mr. Rawlings, precisely what Mr. Kufuor had hoped to gain from having Mr. Arkaah truck with him. You see, the ideological difference between r-CPP campers and those of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo School is strikingly akin to the proverbial sharp contrast between night and day, with the figurative night, of course, being perfectly represented by the r-CPP aficionados. One thing, however, is quite clear: Nana Nsiah Nketia is absolutely nobody’s fool. And as that tired old adage goes, the old party hack and sometime diplomat knows precisely where his bread is buttered, both literally and metaphorically. And he is more than poised to having a full-breakfast and brunch with the same.
It is also not clear in which of the two Koreas Nana Nketiah served as Ghana’s chief diplomat; not that it would matter anyhow. What matters most to observe here is that the very art of diplomacy entails being suavely and deftly able to speak with both sides of one’s mouth at the same time. Among the Akan, another of the several definitions of “Diplomacy” is “Konkonsa.” In the annals of both pre- and postcolonial Ghana, the widely acclaimed cultural matrix of diplomacy is the Central Region’s township of Elmina or Edina. In short, the Edina people appear to have patented the globally revered art of diplomacy, thus the world-famous expression of “Elmina Konkonsa.”
Once I had an elderly Caribbean gentleman, from either Trinidad or Guyana, ask whether I had ever heard the term “Elmina Konkonsa.” Boy, was I pleasantly surprised!
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph. D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
November 12, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
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