Stop this Scandalous Talk about Parliamentary Collaboration between NPP and NDC

It is rather comical and logically absurd for anybody to suggest that, somehow, while electoral bribery and corruption run rampantly riotous throughout Fourth-Republican Ghana and has been so since the inception of our present political dispensation, that is, at least since 1992, or thereabouts, nevertheless, one rabid fanatical ideologue of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) by the name of Kofi Amenyo, writing from London, UK, most of the time, would have the global Ghanaian community believe that the seduction of voters with such freebies as cash and “essential commodities,” is ultra vires or out of bounds of legal propriety for members and operatives of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) – (See “Amewu’s Hohoe Victory and the Increasing Role of Bribery in Our Elections” Modernghana.com 12/28/20).

For Mr. Amenyo, who often writes on Ewe-centered issues, the bribing of voters at election time was well under control and much healthily so while the politicians and key operatives of the Jerry John Rawlings-founded and Ewe- and Northern-dominated operatives of the National Democratic Congress, who actually initiated this patently unethical and pathological practice, were the maestros of this ungodly art, until the relatively stolid or slowwitted leaders of the New Patriotic Party suddenly and quickly took to the game, learned the rules very fast and soon began to do better at it than its National Democratic Congress’ authors. For this reason, the critic, who appears to hail from the same Hohoe constituency as Mr. John Peter Amewu, the Akufo-Addo-appointed current Energy Minister, would have the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) clamp down on the political activities of newly elected New Patriotic Party Members of Parliament, including having Mr. Amewu investigated and forced to declare his assets, obviously because the widely acclaimed most hardworking and dynamic Akufo-Addo Minister has violated the rules and norms of propriety by winning the long National Democratic Congress’ cannibalized and monopolized Hohoe parliamentary seat for the Akan-founded and Akan-dominated New Patriotic Party.

We must also quickly point out that the NPP is both Akan-founded and Akan-dominated because for more than a decade, it was the Ewe-controlled Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy that exclusively dominated Ghana’s political terrain. The erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), which was suavely and seamlessly transformed into the faux-civilian National Democratic Congress on the eve of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, was the only game in town, as it were. Mr. Amenyo also thinks that offering freebies to voters near polling stations, as he has virulently accused Mr. Amewu of doing, is not the most effective way to spread the nation’s wealth, conveniently forgetting to acknowledge the fact that implementing the fee-free Senior High School System has neither endeared President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to eligible voters of the Volta Region nor attracted the latter significantly to the ruling New Patriotic Party.

Neither did the John Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) which, by the way, the leaders of the National Democratic Congress royally bungled, affect the voting pattern of Voltaians between 2000 and 2009. At any rate, it bears pointedly observing that it appears that the fanatically crusading Ewe nationalist and passionate National Democratic Congress’ partisan especially resents the very notion that Mr. Amewu, once a staunch partisan and operative of the National Democratic Congress, would cross party lines to truck with the “New Patriotic Party Enemy.” But, interestingly, Mr. Amenyo is intelligent enough to also point out the fact that as a member and operative of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. Amewu was never successful, other than winning a few minor local elections here and there, now and again. Which goes to obviously inform the studious and critically thinking reader that Mr. Amewu is a genius politician who accurately sized up his fortunes and came to the epiphanic realization and conclusion that his destiny, if he really wanted to become a successful politician and a significant and/or major leader, definitely lay in the camp and the establishment of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo-inspired New Patriotic Party, and not the Rawlings-Tsikata chaperoned bloody “revolutionary” juggernaut that was and is still the National Democratic Congress.

In the foregoing sense and context, therefore, Mr. Amewu could strikingly be envisaged to be the avatar of the late Maj. Emmanuel Courage Koblah Quarshigah, who also saw the proverbial light earlier on and quickly became a member and ministerial superstar of the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party. From the pulse of current events, it is highly likely that if any Ewe-descended Ghanaian politician, since the late President Jerry John Rawlings, should ever accede to the Presidency in our generation and our lifetime, that personality is apt to be none other than the man who Mr. Amenyo would literally have burned at the stake, in the aftermath of a medieval type of auto-da-fe.

It is also quite significant and interesting that Mr. Amenyo’s call for the political persecution and prosecution of Mr. Amewu comes in the wake of widespread allegations that at least one National Democratic Congress-sponsored polling agent or official, by the name of Mary Adatsi, was caught red-handed ripping up Akufo-Addo’s mini-portraits from ballot papers and handing over these criminally damaged ballot papers to some prospective voters, so as to make it seem as if Candidate John “Akonfem-Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama, the former President and the 2020 Nominee for President on the ticket of the main opposition National Democratic Congress, was at the very top of the ballot, as determined by an act of lottery legitimately conducted by the Jean Adukwei Mensa-headed Independent Electoral Commission, instead of being the Number Two Presidential Candidate in the 2020 Presidential Election.

For the passionately and fanatically partisan Mr. Amenyo, this veritable act of criminality must come as perfectly normal and one that is perfectly in synch with established NDC tradition of ballot-snatching and ballot-rigging. We have news for Mr. Amenyo; and it is simply that the crusading NDC goon squad or platoon commander has not seen anything yet. Which, of course, goes without saying that Mr. John Peter Amewu’s Hohoe seat is the beachhead from which the strategists and operatives of the Mahamudu Bawumia-led New Patriotic Party intend to take over the entire Volta Region in a lightening-speed sortie in due course. The Amenyos of Hohoe and elsewhere in the Volta Region had better watch out!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

December 28, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]