A new job for Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang - Enimil Ashon writes
One sure way to kill a rumour before it starts is for you to be the one to start it. It is called Preemptive Communication.
The March 30 press statement announcing the sudden illness of the Vice-President, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, and flight out of the country for medical treatment did just that: it disabled the mongers, the rumour sellers.
Someone at the Jubilee House deserves a medal for couching that communication. Equally deserving of communication kudos is the handling of the media coverage at the airport on her arrival back home.
The Christian Bible records in the first chapter of Job that “there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them”.
While we praise, we also shame. Were it not so criminal, I was going to stop short of pouring contempt and ignominy on the head of that prophet who told his congregants on March 30 that God had revealed to him that the Vice-President was not going to come back alive from that trip!
Countrymen and women, no single Ghanaian must remain untouched after pronouncing the Vice-President (or any Ghanaian, for that matter) dead before their time.
The last time I checked, the police have a crime called causing “fear and panic”.
Well, welcome back home, Prof, and to life in all its fullness. I believe, however, that God called Naana Esumamba Jane Opoku-Agyemang out of academia onto the pinnacle of political power, and saved her from death for a reason.
God has an assignment for this lady and this assignment is not among her constitutionally sanctioned key performance indicators (KPIs).
Crisis
Ghana is going through its worst moral crisis, second only to the conditions prevailing in the nation a few years preceding the June 4 Revolution.
Here’s what I believe: that revolution was godsend: Ghana needed it. Remove the personality of Flt Lt Rawlings from history. Social psychologists have a debate that seeks to answer the question: “The individual or society?” Was June 4 a social upheaval by itself or was it worked up by an individual?
If Naana Jane answers the divine call to take up the role I have in mind, she will, one day, be cited in the debate by students of sociology.
Sociology, because Ghana has come to a time in its life when forces of immorality are overwhelming it.
It is not just the deadly dog-eat-dog situation of thieves and cut-throats willing to lie, harm or kill each other to acquire what society defines as success.
KPI
God has allowed Naana to be elected and has saved her from death to perform this one KPI: to declare and fight a war on moral and physical decay. Kufuor’s Vice-President, Aliu Mahama, declared the war but did not execute it.
Rawlings started it but he fought out of anger and did not know how to sustain it.
For an example of the moral filth I am talking about, I will ask Naana Jane to ask for a recording of the Citi Breakfast Show of last Wednesday on which Bernard and his team discussed Galamsey in the Volta Region.
“The boys are in the bush making money from Galamsey and the girls are chasing them there for transactional sex”.
In the North of Ghana, a place hitherto untouched by moral decay, ‘Red’ has reduced young men and girls into zombies and sleepwalkers.
In some towns in the Central Region, girls are said to be relocating to Tarkwa (Western) to “bake and sell bread”. They are chasing up the boys to the Galamsey pits: sex for money.
Those remaining in the villages are doing strip-tease!!!
The adult population is busily “killing or being killed for political appointments”; their only way to be seen to have made it in life; pastors/prophets see “charismatic acrobatics” (apologies to Pastor Mensa Otabil) as their way of profiteering from the work of God.
Plead
To Naana Jane I plead: you can choose to be the lame Vice-President reading speeches and waiting for assignments from the President (more or less a “driver’s mate”), or you can proactively use your position and womanhood to carve a niche in the moral and social redemption of Ghana.
Of course, you rush blindly into this niche without consultation with your boss: think through it, put those thoughts on paper, emphasising particularly the how.
Why is a morality crusade needed? Commenting on Ghana’s recent discovery of rare earth minerals, such as, lithium, cobalt, tantalum, nickel and uranium, a commentator said, “This nation is blessed beyond imagination.” Blessed, yes, but immorality can turn it into a curse.
Naana Jane, here is your mandate. Let it be said of you that the first female Vice-President worked to save Ghana from depravity.
