Trust Me, Yaw Gyampo, NDC Is Not the Least Bit Attractive

He spent most of the last four years caustically lambasting the Akufo-Addo Administration, rather than proffering constructive criticism, so it comes as quite refreshing that Prof. Ransford Yaw Gyampo, the University of Ghana’s political scientist, should be offering the President what he deems or appears to be his candid opinion about what Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and the leaders of the ruling New Patriotic Party need to do, if they are not to be completely overwhelmed by events going into the 2024 General Election (See “Appoint Dan Botwe as Chief-of-Staff – Gyampo to Akufo-Addo” Daily Mail / Ghanaweb.com 12/26/20).

The leadership of the New Patriotic Party should welcome the suggestions presented by Prof. Gyampo; as the tired, old maxim goes: “One can never have a surfeit of counseling” or too much advice. The fact of the matter, though, is that what the rabid critic of Nana Akufo-Addo offers here is patently pedestrian and an indiscriminate rehashing of what many of us avid pro-NPP observers and critics have already discussed on the various media websites and news portals ad nauseam. Among such critical observations is the fact that increasingly, during the course of the last four years, a remarkable percentage of the leaders of the New Patriotic Party eerily and strikingly came to replicate the morbid behavior of their National Democratic Congress’ predecessors, such as the inordinate exhibition of greed, arrogance and their general level of practice and tolerance for corruption.

The NPP leaders came to acquire what may be aptly termed as the “My Turn Mentality,” whereby the focus of their newly attained political status came to be perceived as a license to blindly and unconscionably amass personal wealth at the expense of the insufferably impoverished and woefully malnourished overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry. Maybe this is what he means, when Prof. Gyampo asserts that the unsavory behavior of the New Masters on the Block increasingly made the democratically vanquished leaders of the John “Airbus” Dramani Mahama-led National Democratic Congress appeared fetchingly and/or smashingly attractive. The truth of the matter is that, by and large, a remarkable percentage of the members of the Ghanaian electorate that voted in their numbers to retire the pathological NDC kleptocrats began to have second thoughts about the integrity of the New Kids on the Block.

It quickly became a matter of picking and choosing between the proverbial devil that one already knew and the angel that one thought one knew but, in reality, was increasingly showing him-/herself to be much worse than the naturally born thieves and political scam-artists in the pay of the National Democratic Congress. On the latter count, the Adjenim-Boateng Scandal at the Public Procurement Authority (PPA) was the most pronounced example of the untrustworthiness of the unknown angel that one, in spite of everything, avidly desired to take on a test drive, if also because this New Kid on the Block appeared to be chockfull of promise, plus the fact that this New Kid on the Block actually had a fetching track record under the previous relatively Gold-Gilt Tenure of former President John (Kofi Diawuo) Agyekum-Kufuor.

The preceding notwithstanding, the real problem faced by the leadership of the New Patriotic Party is being virulently or aggressively confronted by a population and/or citizenry that has been long used to promises of instant gratification from their politicians and thus has come to cultivate no remarkable sense of appreciation for delayed gratification in exchange for sustainable long-term economic growth and development, and the imperative need for the establishment and implementation of projects and programs with positive holistic societal impact, such as the fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative unprecedently established by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and the progressive and significantly cost-cutting National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), originally implemented by the Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party at the turn of the Twenty-First Century or Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Dispensation. By and large, the ordinary Ghanaian is more at home with the kind of election-time petty bribery indulged by the leadership of the National Democratic Congress in exchange for votes, a tactical electoral maneuver of absolutely no long-term impact or significance.

On the question of the constructive use of dialogue as a means of preserving the national peace, security and tranquility between the country’s two main political parties, namely, the ruling New Patriotic Party and the opposition National Democratic Congress, maybe if he had spent enough time critically studying the “revolutionary” history of the leadership of the Jerry John Rawlings-founded erstwhile junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), that was seamlessly morphed into the present-day faux socialist establishment of the National Democratic Congress, Prof. Gyampo would have more fully appreciated the fact that with the hawkish likes of Messrs. John “Akonfem-Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama, Johnson Asiedu-Nketia and Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, the critical language of choice is the maximum application of the coercive apparatus of the State.

The NDC leadership had to be literally dragged by the nose into Ghana’s present democratic political culture. Candidate Mahama authoritatively affirmed the incontrovertible veracity of the preceding observation, when in the leadup to the 2020 General Election, he imperiously noted, while stumping in the Volta Region, in response to what he vacuously perceived to be threats posed by elements associated with the ruling New Patriotic Party, that the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress had a very enviable history in the swift and preemptive application of violence that was institutionally second-to-none in Ghana’s postcolonial era. Ultimately, it also needs to be made crystal clear, and unabashedly so, that while it may not be the least bit perfect as all human institutional establishments, nevertheless, the Jean Adukwei Mensa-led Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) may unarguably be the best of its kind on the African Continent to-date.

Prof. Gyampo would vividly recall the fact that in the 2012 Presidential Election, it was a Georgina T. Wood established panel of Supreme Court jurists that determined the real outcome of the polling results, and not the extant Electoral Commissioner, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, who had been at this admittedly most sensitive and energy-sapping post for some twenty protracted years! We must also quickly point out that Dr. Afari-Gyan was a bona fide operative of the then-ruling National Democratic Congress. But even more significant was the sheepish public pronouncement by Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the dynastic General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, that, indeed, it was the then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo who had resoundingly carried the vote in the 2012 Presidential Election, except that Messrs. Afari-Gyan and Mahama had scandalously colluded to snatch victory from the jowls of Nana Akufo-Addo and into the laps of a crushingly defeated Interim-President Mahama.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

December 30, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]