Both NPP and NDC Royally Failed on Speaker Choice

I have often said that in any stiff or very close contest for power between operatives of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the National Democratic Congress would almost invariably win hands down. So, I was not the least bit surprised when the NDC’s Parliamentary Leaders used all the dirty tricks on the books and in their political trick-bag to have their equally jaded choice for Parliamentary Speaker, Mr. Alban SK Bagbin, to clinch the same. About the only wonder here is that the ruling New Patriotic Party in our 8^th practically Hung Parliament, still had the advantage of the one recently defected Independent, the disgruntled Adansi Fomena MP who, having been apparently finessed out of a parliamentary primary victory in the leadup to the 2020 General Election, decided to teach his party and his treacherous Constituency Executives an edifying lesson and won hands down and bigtime in the process.

He still insists that he never left the party, but that he was rather unwisely pushed out by some local party executives who had a personal vendetta against him and were not necessarily the sort of ideal party loyalists bent, at all costs, on ensuring that the party succeeded in the 2020 General Election. Well, Mr. Andrew Amoako Asiamah has proven his detractors wrong; and in exchange for his iron-clad loyalty to the New Patriotic Party, he has demanded the summary dismissal, actually resignation, of all the executive operatives of the Fomena Constituency, the Chairman of whom, we are told by the media, suddenly took ill sometime shortly after Mr. Asiamah defeated their candidate and decided to voluntarily retire from office. As of this writing, it was not known to yours truly whether the rest of the Fomena Constituency’s local executives had complied or were still smack at post. Sweet revenge appears to be fast playing out here. The kind of party infighting that occurred at Adansi-Fomena, one of my paternal ancestral hometowns, ran relatively more rampantly and riotously in the New Patriotic Party in the runup to the 2020 General Election than it did among the ranks of the savvier executive operatives of the megalomaniacal and kleptocratic Jerry John Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress.

For example, has anybody among the New Patriotic Party’s National Assembly Representatives (NAR) or Parliamentarians bothered to figure out how it came about that it was only a voter from their section of the parliamentary aisle that well appears not to have been able to fill out his/her (their?) ballot paper for the election of the Speaker of the House correctly? Haven’t we, all of us Ghanaian citizens and voters, been rest assured by the operatives of the New Patriotic Party that it was their counterparts of the National Democratic Congress who could barely read and write, if at all? So, how did it happen that the lone damaged or spoilt ballot presumably came from the side of the membership of the more erudite and progressive of the two major political parties in the country? And just why is nobody on the New Patriotic Party’s side of the parliamentary aisle calling for an immediate investigation and the prompt rectification of the same? Personally, I suspect there was some sort of secret bipartisan pact or collusion to have the operatives of National Democratic Congress hocus-pocus their way to victory in the election of Speaker of the House for the effectively Hung 8^th Parliament.

So, all this bunk talk by my Akuapem-Akropong SALEM junior schoolmate and dear relative, Mr. Samuel Atta-Akyea, about the possibility of a party mole’s having crossed aisles to vote for “The Enemy” is just absolutely that. Sheer bunk! The fact of the matter is that if you were looking for which NPP House Members are most likely to have voted for Speaker-Elect Alban SK Bagbin, you need not look any farther beyond the bodies or persons and shadows of Messrs. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the NPP’s Parliamentary Majority Leader, and Mr. Dominic Nitiwul, the Gentleman from Bimbilla who also presently doubles as Ghana’s Minister of Ghana’s present Minister of Defense. After all, some four years ago, were not these same crony-capitalist mercenary political chums of his who crossed party lines to vigorously campaign for the reelection of the recently retired Nadowli-West National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament, from the Upper-West Region, when in the same Nadowli-West Constituency, the New Patriotic Party had a party-nominated and approved candidate who was gunning for the very seat that the putative Parliamentary Methuselah appeared to be on the verge of losing?

Well, at the time, the Kumasi-Suame NPP-MP sent a categorical message to the Kingmakers of his own party, to the effect that given a choice between party loyalty and the thick-as-blood kinship that existed between Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu and the now-Speaker-Elect Alban SK Bagbin, one that had been deliberately and meticulously forged by virtue of parliamentary longevity, one, that is, the pro-NPP critic, could just as well chuck the Elephant Party into one of those Zoomlion-supplied jumbo trashcans. Yes, that’s how come Speaker-Elect Bagbin won the Speaker’s Chair over the more erudite but equally ideologically and philosophically jaded Speaker Aaron Michael Oquaye.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

January 7, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]