It is perhaps hard to believe that our venerable brother, Lawyer John Akparibo Ndebugre (affectionately known as John Nde), was put behind the curtains of earthly life at Timonde, in Bawku West, on July 16, 2022.
I walked with this principled man on the same mutual latitude for over fifty years without the need for any of the two of us - the doubles - to grease the relationship at any giving time. Truly, our line of thoughts and opinions mutually intersected in multiple dimensional junctions. Where we disagreed in principle, we found common ground, balanced solutions. How these nuances worked in the relationship were summarily based on the fact that we saw in ourselves as mirrors and reflective replicas of each other.
On the first anniversary of the combined internment of his remains and funeral rites, I have the pleasure to remember him profoundly in this write up, which is an addition to the many eulogies I have already written about the man's physical, intellectual and social characterisation, his careers, capabilities, and inspirational character, as well as his earthly achievements, and even his shortfalls.
From close range observations, John Nde was seen as a rare gem, endowed with extreme knowledge and excessive foresight of immense usefulness. He was an icon of Ghana and a patriot of par excellence in Kusaug. He had a masculine heart and ready to pursue his genuine aspirations irrespective of who he was confronting in the line of his planned actions. These were the reasons why the Government gave him a State funeral in Accra before the burial of his remains his hometown, Timonde.
Ironically, when he demonstrated these traits at early age, a Mamprusi man, Mr. Imoru Salifu (aka Amore-Billa), the then Regional Commissioner for the Upper Region under the Progress Party (PP) Administration, targeted, isolated and dismissed him from Navrongo Secondary School (Navasco) in 1971 on trumped up indiscipline charges.
The hateful action of Mr. Imoru Salifu thus truncated the pursuit of his Advanced Level course. Nonetheless, John Nde jumped over the artificially created deplorable huddles and led himself into the acquisition of Chemical Engineering Degree from the University of Science and Technology (UST), Kumasi. That determined and stellar achievement, in the midst of many man-made obstacles, was an upload of additional forms of inspiration and motivation for his younger Kusasi brothers and sisters to download. And some of us did in our own career pathways.
In the area of the Kusaug struggle, he was a man of boundless courage, nobility and determination. Furthermore, he was strategic, robust, strong-willed and wholehearted man that combined to work seamlessly towards the total emancipation of his people in Kusaug. John Nde's commitment to the Kusaug struggles was no doubt unparalleled. In consequence, John Nde was someone who read the direction, outcomes and consequences of the Kusaug struggle with utmost sense of precision for seeking total and sustainable independence in Kusaug, drawing from past experiences in the 1971 Navasco episode, in which he was one of the two Kusaas victims. The other Kusaa that was traumatized by the cranky Imoru Salifu hubris was Lawyer Cletus Apuul Avoka. John Nde's role in the formulation and enactment of the PNDC Law 75 and the institutionalization of the annual SAMANPIID Festival, amongst others, couldn't be discounted on any day. Unfortunately, he did not see the absolute consummation of this inevitability before he died. However, he left behind a sumptuous legacy that continuous to reverberate in the lips of many Kusaas, including those who didn't even know him.
John Nde would always be remembered for his assistance to get the youth in Kusaug into the Kwame Nkrumah Youth Institute in the Isles of Cuba for further studies in many disciplines of academic endeavours. Many of the products of his Cuba efforts now serve Kusaug and Ghana in diverse capacities and professions.
He also assisted many Kusaas in various areas of human endeavours. He was always prepared to accommodate and feed victims of the Kusaug struggle. For example, he extended this cordiality and kinship responsibility to all the Kusasi brothers who were arrested in 1986 by soldiers on the orders of Chairman Rawlings and imprisoned at Burma Camp without trial. Food was prepared on daily basis and delivered to the "inmates" by his wife, Madam Sophia Ndebugre, in spite of the lack of meaningful job at the time for the family to earn income. I am aware that John Nde, when alive, provided legal, moral, consular, financial and material assistances to a number of vulnerable Kusaas on gratis.
John Nde had a distinct identity - *honesty, accountability, patriotism and responsible national character.* John Nde was often bothered to ensure the fulfillment of the principles of probity, equity and selflessness. These lofty ideals prompted the PNDC to call him from Nigeria in 1982 to serve within the superstructure of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC). And he did do so for nation with integrity, loyalty and honesty for four years.
John Nde became jobless in 1985 after he had had disagreements with Flt J. J. Rawlings on some core principles on soil fertility and subsidies. Adherence to strict personal principles had created a deep wedge between the two revolutionaries, which the PNDC bureaucracy helped him to resign from the superstructure of the regime much against the wishes and admonitions of his intimate friend Captain (rtd) Kojo Tsikata, the then National Security Co-ordinator. The man John Nde could tell it to anyone without fear of repudiation or censure. He had honestly told his boss, Flt. Lt. J. J. Rawlings that he would not sign a letter authorising the removal of subsidies on imported inorganic fertilizers that a whiteman had imported and brought into the country. What he sought to protect Ghanaian farmers was seen as crass insubordination by his boss; hence, the rift that generated therefrom between the two former friends upscaled into irreparable and perforated levels.
John Nde showed qualities of modesty and independence when it all mattered to survive. The joblessness didn't knock him off his faculties into a sedentary life. In 1986, he converted his personal Peugeot 504 Caravan into and registered it as a private long-distance transporter, plying between Accra and Aflao on daily basis by himself as a driver. After sometime into this foray of coping strategy, John Nde got himself enlisted into the Ghana Law School in the same year, while cutting down the number of days he spent on Aflao-Accra road as a commercial driver. Thus, John Nde died and carried along with him nutritious acumen in Professional Driving, Science, Engineering and Law.
To conclude, Lawyer Akparibo Ndebugre was both eccentrically *helpful to others and thoughtful of home first*. No doubt, most of those in Kusaug that passed through the superstructures of PNDC and National Democratic Congress (NDC), and subsequently became political oligarchs did so through the direct recommendations and tutelage of John Nde. He was also an ultranationalist trying to fulfill this patriotic mission of total decolonisation of Kusaug.
Of course, most persons cast in the mold of Lawyer John Ndebugre, who upheld the rare principles of truth, justice, honesty, accountability and social equity were often derogatorily consigned as irrational and controversial troublemakers and litigants by other people who were selfish and envious and discretely against the larger progressive social development and fidelity.
Those positive attributes were John Nde's lifetime and continual Achilles hills. Following from his demise on Friday, May 06, 2022, there were dramatic psychic shifts and varied eulogies from well-wishers, and hateful readouts, of course, from the Mamprusis. The pluralistic eulogies magnified on his burial day (July 16, 2022), some from people with plastic faces and crocodile tear buds, who, before his demise on that sad day, were self proclaimed and sworn enemies of a man considered, arguably, as the most honest, sincere, accountable, and far-thinking person in Kusaug and probably in Ghana. We know that there were some of his brethren that spoke to him facing him delightfully but turned round to malign, insult, denigrate, and stab him viciously at the back and through his heart. We need not rouse the rubble!
John Nde clinically left us a year ago, but buried and 'knighted' posthumously by his brethren and friends through a heap of voluptuous eulogies. John Nde was to Kusaug as Dr. Nkrumah was to Ghana. For us the Kusaas, John Nde never dies! He deserves the mantra. What is short in our allulsation of the icon is to name him after a monument in Kusaug.
Death is inevitable and the messenger often carries no passport before striking its chosen victims. We only take consolation in the fact that his soul would spiritually continue to hold the sky above us and protect Kusaas and Kusaug against the potential evil usurpers. When we remember John Nde in moments like these, we have the solid reason to succeed in our genuine struggles.
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