No Voodoo Gospel Preacher Can Upend 2024 Winsome NPP Strategy

They glibly quote the Christian Holy Bible like parakeets, but we all know that these one-man church proprietors are veritable advocates for Lucifer, the fabled smashingly handsome angel whose conspiracy to dethrone and replace the Divine Godhead, we are told, got him expelled from the Celestial Kingdom down to Earth, where he has been scheming and mendaciously deputizing for the very Divine Providence who, once upon a time, punitively pushed him down this way. Well, it all boils down to one commonsensical observation; and it is that anybody who has been studiously following political developments in Fourth-Republican Ghana for the past generation, that is, the past twenty-five to thirty years, is well aware of the fact that any dastardly attempt to invidiously and tendentiously meddle with the, so far, winsome strategy of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), is very likely to see the most progressive political establishment in the country literally crash out of the firmaments of Ghana’s democratic political culture.

The John Agyekum-Kufuor Faction of the New Patriotic Party, presently muted or on reprieve, once attempted to nullify the will of a slight albeit critical majority of party members, supporters and sympathizers and failed royally and miserably in 2008 and also 2012, but this internally generated negative force was quite formidable enough to cause the political equivalent of major fault lines or quite considerable structural damage in the party; which was why it also took the then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo nearly a decade to reset Ghana on the salutary path of positive reconstructive change and significant development. In the basic law of physics or principles of the physical world, there is something called action and reaction. In other words, to every action, there is a countervailing force called a reaction. And until these two diametrically opposed principles have completely played themselves out and the beneficent semblance of a balance is restored, it is absolutely impossible to restart a similar, albeit far more positive and constructive, process. Any foolhardy attempt to buck the normal and natural order of things is bound to end up in an apocalyptic tragedy.

We need to be well focused, fully vigilant and eternally awake and eagle-eyed alert, at least from now until the next general election, four years from now, if another seismic setback such as that which was deliberately set up and orchestrated in the proverbially long and hot summer of 2008 and, to a lesser intense and extent, 2012, is not to painfully and catastrophically wreak havoc or repeat itself. We do not need to cause a philosophically regressive reprise of what the globally immortalized Prof. Albert Einstein referred to as “Madness,” which is to simply repeat the same thing over and over again while gratuitously expecting different results. In 2008, a lame-duck President John (Kofi Diawuo) Agyekum-Kufuor decided to play the same ethnic-chauvinist political con game that some of these Voodoo Gospel Preachers and Prophets are strenuously and scandalously attempting to revive, even well before the second and final tenure of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has commenced, by outrageously and irascibly deciding not to even perfunctorily endorse Nana Akufo-Addo’s professionally astute, politically versatile and administratively progressive northern-descended incumbent Vice-President, namely, Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, in much the same short-shrift manner that a departing President Kufuor had done to the man with whom he had governed the country for some two consecutive terms of 8 years, namely Alhaji Aliu Mahama, of blessed memory.

The lame-duck Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor would cunningly and predictably play “neutral” and niggardly with his long and widely expected endorsement of Mr. Aliu Mahama, while flagrantly leaving absolutely no studious observer in doubt that his preferred and favorite Presidential Candidate was a bona fide member of his own clan. To be certain, prior to leaving Alhaji Mahama out in the subtropical cold, Mr. Kufuor’s candidate of choice to succeed him had also long been known to be his favorite cabinet appointee. Uncle Kofi Diawuo would fiercely, albeit furtively, fight for his pet political racehorse but would, not surprisingly, come well short of his objective at least on two occasions. You see, to tactically justify the flagrantly unjustifiable, Uncle Diawuo, at least reliable rumors had it, would spread word around that the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was much too vindictive of a politician to be trusted with the leaden mantle of the Presidency.

Some critical and studious observers of our national political terrain firmly believe that it is the necklace, or albatross, of this curse that both haunted and hamstrung the recently reelected President Akufo-Addo throughout his first term and prevented Ghana’s former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice from being progressively and constructively focused on his publicly declared war against official corruption. My good, old Uncle Kofi Diawuo’s jinx or not, the buck of the massive failure of Nana Akufo-Addo’s pontifically declared war against official corruption still stops on the desk of our incumbent President. It cannot and must not be any other way. The fact of the matter is that the dauphin of Justice Edward Akufo-Addo desperately and fiercely fought to be elected President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, a job the mere shadow of which his own father had once held as the ceremonial and venerable right-hand man of Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia. Now, among the Akan-speaking majority populace of Ghana, we have a saying that runs as follows: “One does not cool up for another to bite.”

The unmistakable reference of the preceding quote is to a category of blood-sucking vermin that are known to cool any part of the human body of any prospective target or victim of their venomous assault. Contrary to what Voodoo Gospel Preachers like the Rev. Anthony Oware Appiah, proprietor of the Lapaz, Accra, based Open Heaven Revival Chapel, would have the rest of the members of the global Ghanaian community believe, it is highly unlikely for the now-ruling New Patriotic Party to winsomely contest Election 2024 without the leadership of the remarkably younger, technocratically more erudite and globally better exposed economic guru like Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia at the top of the presidential nomination ticket of the New Patriotic Party, with Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyeremateng as the most logical presidential undercard, or the running-mate of Dr. Bawumia.

You see, in these two highly likely 2024 New Patriotic Party Presidential Nominee and Running-Mate, respectively, I see strikingly reflected the fetching and winsome images of former US President Barack H. Obama and the now-President-Elect Joseph Robinette Biden. Trust me, it could not be any other permutation, if the New Patriotic Party wants to occupy the Presidency for as long as it sustainably takes to thoroughly revolutionize the socioeconomic, technological and cultural development of Fourth-Republican Ghana.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

December 29, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]