The Battle For Succession to the Golden Stool Intensifies…. Who Becomes Asantehene? is the lead story in the edition of the Crusading Guide. The story says the death and burial arrangements of Otumfuo Opoku Ware having been settled the Ashanti nation now turns it’s energies to finding the 16th occupant of the golden stool.
The paper states that, though it might seem hasty and disrespectful to the memory of the late King, the fact is that the process of choosing a new Asantehene has to follow a very strict time table that requires that a new Asantehene is enstooled within forty days of the death of the reigning one.
Highly placed sources at the Manhyia palace have indicated that unlike the smooth and unanimous choice of Otumfou Ware the second to succeed his uncle Otumfuo Osei Agyemang Prempeh the second in 1970, things are being up to a hotly contested battle this time round.
The Crusading Guide says according to their grapevine there are as many as seven eligible candidates jostling for the position. It adds that the successor will be announced only after a long series of nominations and deliberations have been made by the Kingmakers of Ashanti.
The paper concludes that most of the current paramount chiefs are all educated. It predicts that if the recent trend of giving due academic consideration and professional experience is to be taken as a guide, the odds are that the next Asantehene will neither be the best known or the one inside the track.
The nomination might fall on a quiet highly qualified medical doctor who sojourned long in the diaspora in order to prepare himself for the onerous task of leading a people deeply steeped in their traditions and customs into technological modernism of the 21st century.
