NPP Must Stop Coddling Disgruntled Parliamentary Defectors

It is high/nigh past time that the movers-and-shakers of the ruling New Patriotic Party focused their sedulous attention on the electioneering campaigns of the party’s successful Parliamentary Candidates and stop indulging the power-drunken ego trips of the likes of Mr. Andrew Amoako Asiamah, the incumbent parliamentarian of the Fomena Constituency who lost his seat in the 2020 parliamentary primaries (See “Kennedy Agyapong Promises MP Who Lost Primaries Government Position” AngelOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/26/20).

The fact of the matter is that Mr. Asiamah lost his reelection bid in his Fomena Constituency because he very likely had not performed to the satisfaction of the party delegates of the aforesaid constituency. If he is convinced that he has been treated unfairly by the very process by which he was elected to Parliament the first time around, he can appeal to the relevant channels of his party for the redress of any legitimate concerns or grievances that he may genuinely have vis-à-vis the set of circumstances by which he lost his primary.

Promising to secure Mr. Asiamah a government appointment or job, in the highly likely reelection of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in the December 7 Presidential Election is unsavorily tantamount to the sort of bribery and corruption that nobody needs to countenance in either the party or the nation at large. It also reeks of some palpably objectionable wrongdoing on the party of the local party executives and/or administrators, as Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, the NPP’s Member of Parliament for Assin-Central clearly appears to be suggesting.

If, indeed, Mr. Agyapong is sincerely convinced that either Mr. Asiamah or any of the other parliamentary incumbents who recently lost their seats had been unfairly treated, then, by all means, he has a bounden obligation to his own conscience and to party members, supporters and sympathizers to explain precisely how unfairly Mr. Asiamah and some of his disgruntled associates have been so treated. Casting innuendoes only undermines the credibility of party executives and the national image and reputation of the party at large.

The fact of the matter is that no parliamentary representative has a proprietary right to the seat to which s/he had been elected by his constituents. Ours is not a Constitutional Monarchy but an enviable popular democracy of a kind that does not exist even here in the United States of America, where the democratic process has been practiced, to varying degrees of credibility and/or soundness for some 240 years.

Refreshingly, the NET-2 TV network proprietor hit the right button when Mr. Agyapong admonished Fomena constituents to massively vote for Mr. Philip Ofori, the contestant who roundly routed Mr. Andrew Amoako Asiamah, who has since decided to file and contest the 2020 parliamentary election as an Independent Candidate. The firebrand Assin-Central NPP-MP is apt to point out that Independent Candidates never really bring home a constituency’s fair share of the proverbial bacon or the national cake, because the real spoils of an electoral victory invariably belongs to a political party majority, and not either to a parliamentary minority or even a remarkable aggregate of independent candidates.

At best, an Independent Candidate is a political pawn, prostitute or gigolo who has to sell his/her conscience in order to make ends meet. This is not what party executives and propagandists ought to be studiously focused upon in the heated sprint towards the homestretch lane of the 2020 general election. Party communicators must keep citing examples of the paltry record of successful independent candidates in the past, in particular, how these egotripping self-centered candidates never lasted for any considerable span of time in the august House or never made any significant long-term impact on the country’s democratic terrain or political culture.

It is also interesting to note that the current epidemic of independent candidacy fever strikingly recalls the 2007 presidential candidacy madness that gripped the then ruling New Patriotic Party because, back then, the then President John Agyekum-Kufuor deceptively appeared to have made democratic governance seem so easy that even a dog without a nametag or veterinary clearance thought it could clinch the presidency by the mere flipping of a coin. If the key NPP operatives are really desirous of routing the Mahama-led NDC in toto, then they need to launch a blistering blitz-Krieg against party defectors whose real aim and/or objective is eerily akin to a “crabs in a bucket” mode of political self-destruction or suicide bombing.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

October 26, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]