Kennedy Agyepong Misses the Point of John Mahama's Gay-Bashing Hypocrisy

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I don't know the motive behind the decision by the Assin-Central New Patriotic Party Member of Parliament to join the controversy swirling around President Mahama, over the latter's alleged friendship with Mr. Andrew Solomon, the gay American novelist and human/civil rights activist (See "Mahama's Friendship with Gay [American] Doesn't Make Him One - Ken Agyapong" Ghanaweb.com 2/5/13). Whatever might have motivated Mr. Agyepong to join the fray does not appear to have meaningfully affected the same.

For starters, the Assin-Central NPP-MP is the one man whom many a key operative of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) loves to hate with abandon for any number of reasons, none the least bit of which is Mr. Agyepong's avid relish in stewing the NDC apparatchiks in their own brine as the occasion may demand. Indeed, in the run-up to Election 2012, the NDC had fiercely battled the NPP firebrand in a bid to effectively immobilizing Mr. Agyepong from active engagement in our national political culture. And here also may be vividly recalled the fact that the former Assin-North MP had once been arrested, cuffed and detained by personnel of the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) and charged with attempted genocide, because Mr. Agyepong had dared to encourage retaliatory measures against diehard anti-Akan NDC tribal warlords and their backers. Indeed, some NDC hacks had even called for Mr. Agyepong to be handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution.

Anyway, my own casual enquiries indicate that Mr. Solomon is far less of a household name than the Ghanaian media would have their audiences believe. Whatever be the case, Mr. Agyepong grossly misses the point in cavalierly presuming that anybody has any problem with the fact of President Mahama's striking a longstanding and cordial relationship with a gay white American man. What peeves most of his countrymen and women is Mr. Mahama's dripping hypocrisy in presuming that he can be good pals with the openly gay Mr. Solomon, and even allow himself to be hosted and toasted by Mr. Solomon, while appearing on Ghana radio and television to vehemently denounce Ghanaian citizens who maintain the same lifestyle as his American buddy as "criminally culpable and morally reprehensible."

In sum, what Ghanaian politicians like Mr. Agyepong ought to focus their attention on, vis-a-vis the gay/lesbian, bisexual/transsexual issue is why the latter lifestyle does not appear to matter when it is pursued by non-Ghanaians and non-African-looking humans outside the geopolitical confines of Ghana but, somehow, become envisaged as criminally outrageous to the extent of being summarily proscribed and anathemized within our national territorial space.

You see, this is what I mean when I talk about Ghana not being led by an enlightened bevy of men and women. It is only people afflicted with acute inferiority complex who can so casually presume to proscribe gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender lifestyle at home while curiously presuming the same lifestyle to be perfectly tolerable and even tenable among non-Ghanaian humans abroad.

To hear Andrew Solomon tell the New York Times that, indeed, President Mahama had telephoned him in India, where the former was attending a fiesta of some sort, to profusely apologize for calling gay lifestyle "criminal" is not only personally embarrassing, it is utterly humiliating to the image of the Ghanaian citizen among his/her global counterparts. And it is rather unfortunate that Mr. Kennedy Agyepong would make it his bounden obligation to mount a public defense of a morally confused rascal like President Mahama.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 18, 2013
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