Nana Akuoku Sarpong: Uncommon politician (Part 2)
Nana Akuoku Sarpong, then President of the Junior Common Room of Commonwealth Hall, was hauled a day or two after the anti-government fracas in Commonwealth Hall in the evening of February 5, 1965 before an interrogation panel chaired by the deputy head of the Special Branch, the redoubtable Ben Forjoe.
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After a thorough grilling on his role in the fracas, he was released after a week to return to complete his legal education.
The answer to the question why Nana Akuoko Sarpong was detained reveals the several cross-currents of intense political rivalries on the Legon campus mirroring national politics rather more than a mere peccadillo gone awry with the Nkrumah government. This is because we all seem to accept that the incarceration of Lawrence Otu Cantey upon the death in detention of Dr Danquah in February 1965 was the effect of his calling for a minute’s silence in memory of Danquah.
Kwame Sarpong had, in his own small way, become the physical symbol of the perennial struggle by students to handle their own affairs without outside interference, whether from the university authorities on campus or the powers that was off-campus.
The Echo Editor
As editor of the hall journal, The Echo, Akuoku Sarpong had ridden on the popularity of his outspoken and bold editorials to defeat Modibo Tawia Ocran for the JCR Presidency of the hall the previous year, 1964.
His editorship cemented his nickname, ‘Shawcross’, which he had earned while in Sixth Form at Opoku Ware Secondary School from his loquacious defence of student causes. Shawcross was the English lawyer who had been deported by the Convention People’s Party (CPP) government while he was busy defending the English journalist, Ian Colvin, in 1957 or thereabouts. Colvin wrote for the Daily Telegraph of London.
Take-over of JCRs
The year 1964 was when the CPP government decided to take over all junior common rooms (JCRs) on campus with party members belonging to the National Association of Socialist Students [NASSO] who had been taken to the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute at Winneba to be prepared for the herculean task of compelling independent-minded students to buy into the process of “cipipification’’ of all national institutions following the referendum and declaration of the one-party state that year.
The victory of the Agogohene turned him into a marked person, someone whom the campus CPP faithful considered worthy of harassment using off-campus authorities. Indeed, his electoral victory inspired other JCRs on campus to reject party impositions in other hall elections. It also moved and persuaded vandals such as Kwesi Botchway to migrate to the new Mensah Sarbah Hall to seek political glory, as well as secure single room lodgings from the crowded Commonwealth Hall.
Private legal practice
Nana completed his law studies that year and was sent to Cape Coast as a State Attorney after a stint in Public Administration at Greenhill, now GIMPA. He spent only a year in government service before venturing out on his own by opening his own law practice in Cape Coast. He had considerable success as a private attorney.
Political career
A couple of years later, in tune with his unique ideological bent, he teamed up with Dr John Bilson and Dr Obed Asamoah to form the Third Force Party for the 1969 elections. But it was stillborn and Dr Asamoah joined Komla Gbedemah’s National Alliance of Liberals (NAL), getting elected to represent Biakoye in the Volta Region in Ghana’s shortlived Second Republic led by Prime Minister Dr Busia.
He later became a board member of the Graphic Corporation during the Busia regime, which allowed him to renew his friendship with Kojo Boakye Gyan before the latter joined the army. Nana Sarpong had known Boakye Gyan at Legon where the latter edited the students’ version of the Legon Observer.
Any conscientious follower of the politics of Nana Agogohene can now predict the direction that these broad strokes I have drawn so far will lead to. One can readily observe a vast network of friends and acquaintances, of professional and personal development, of a comprehensive social mesh being constructed by a personality whose concerns were beyond the merely personal and comfortable. I have already said in the earlier part that the effort at the reconstruction of his eventful life will only concentrate on the highlights, since a fuller, more detailed biography awaits another time. His is a life in which his networking from his earliest days bore much fruit, an object lesson for the youth of today whose egoistic self-absorption mirrors their discontent.
Akuoku Sarpong in Parliament
It was his professional colleague and longtime friend, Victor Owusu, who invited him to stand and ran for Parliament in 1979 on the ticket of the Popular Front Party that Victor eventually came to lead on the eve of the Third Republic, led by President Hilla Limann. The constitution in those days permitted chiefs to stand for partisan office and take part in politics, as I have already pointed out regarding the chairmanship of the PFP by Alhaji Yakubu Tali, the Tolon-Na.
December 31 coup
The coup of December 31, 1981 ended his parliamentary career and sent him into political detention in Nsawam. He was invited to join the PNDC first by his Agogo subject and close friend, Benjamin Boansi Kwabena Donkor Asamoah, better known as BBD Asamoah, the first Chairman of the Committee of PNDC Secretaries in October 1982. BBD renewed the invitation two years later. He turned both invitations down. He was also invited by Justice Annan who used their mutual love for sports, their legal profession and their Accra Academy background to effect an acceptance, which also failed.
It was the several efforts of his former political colleague, Obed Asamoah, which succeeded in making Nana join the government of the PNDC at Easter 1988, first as Secretary for Health, round about the same time his former parliamentary colleague, Owusu Acheampong, and KB Asante, also joined. He remembers to this day the words of Obed “Principle without power is barren.’’ Interestingly enough, he informed both Victor Owusu and his former parliamentary colleague and earlier PNDC Secretary, J.A. Kufuor, now former President Kufuor, about his invitation, and they both welcomed it. Nana’s last public office was a member of the Council of State for the third NDC government led by President Mills, and after his death in harness, of President Mahama, from 2009 to 2013.
Working relations
Nana has fantastic stories to retail of his excellent working relations with Chairman and later President Rawlings, and Captain Kojo Tsikata, which definitely requires more than a newspaper column to do justice to. He was at the centre of most of the events which have assumed folk status dimensions these days. He always conducted himself as a chief, with personal dignity, firm and clear in his dealings yet solicitous of human failings. It is indicative of his Catholic interests and revealing of the trust he garnered that President Rawlings always urged Nana to write his memoirs. It is hoped that this piece will encourage him to give us his detailed perspectives on the Rawlings years from his years of active participation.