I write as the man who once stood behind your husband as his Special Aide, the guardian at the door of your shared life, and the witness to how you and Jerry John walked through history hand in hand.
From the cockpit of revolution to the quiet corridors of democracy, I watched you refuse the narrow corset of ceremony and step into battle dress for Ghana’s children.
You never asked for salutes; you earned them.
While others built statues, you built kitchens, day-care centres and confidence, teaching market women that a ledger could be a louder megaphone than any slogan.
I remember the nights you sent your own dinner to soldiers on cold sentry duty, insisting, “Stomachs must be full if hearts are to be brave.”
Your palm, small as it was, became the roof under which an entire generation recovered its dignity.
You spoke in proverbs, lived in parables.
“The bamboo bends, the oak breaks,” you reminded us when the winds of coup and counter-coup howled.
We bent, we did not break.
“A tree is known by its fruit,” you whispered, pointing to girls who once carried water now carrying briefcases.
Those fruits still drop seeds across the continent.
You carried the nation the way a market woman balances her tray, steady, chin up, feet dancing around potholes, never once spilling the future.
Now the market is silent, the tray set down.
Yet every step we take echoes the rhythm you drummed into us: Service without spectacle, courage without costume, love without ledger.
So, we will not lower you into the past; we will fold you into tomorrow’s pocket.
Wherever a woman votes without fear, wherever a child is named “Konadu Agyeman” because her mother dares to dream, you will be there, quietly straightening the collar of the nation you once dressed for school.
Rest, Nana.
The shade you planted is wide enough for us all.
The writer was a Special Aide to former President J.J. Rawlings
