We Need to Think Far Ahead for a 2024 Win, Ken

There is a saying that “It is the early bird that catches the worm” or, to put it more prosaically but clearly, “It is the bird that rises much earlier than all his/her siblings and peers who gets to eat more abundantly.” The notion that, somehow, forward-looking and forward-thinking operatives and strategists of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) should sit put until 2022 to start campaigning or scheming for the retention of Jubilee House and Parliament House, for that matter – how I wish we could rename the edifice of our National Assembly of Representatives (NAR) Danquah House – is scandalously naïve, to say the least (See “Alan, Bawumia Contest for 2024 Not Healthy at the Moment – Kennedy Agyapong” 3News.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/10/21).

There is also another equally tired, old maxim that goes as follows: “Time and tide wait for no man/no one.” The fact of the matter is that with all the lurid baggage of political promiscuity that was made public in the wake of the bogus election of Mr. Alban SK Bagbin, as Speaker of our National Assembly, by the suicide-craving leaders of the New Patriotic Party in Parliament, we cannot afford to have these same political prostitutes, and here, of course, I include Ken Agyapong among this group, decide for the rest of us when to begin strategizing for a massive win in the upcoming 2024 General Election. The Alan-Bawumia debate and political slugfest had better begin right now before it is darn too late. You see, short of any unforeseen circumstances, the Candidate for President on the side of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has already been mapped out and determined by the movers and shakers of the NDC. The NPP’s strategists also need to start selecting and preparing our highly likely 2024 team of Presidential-Candidate Material right now or be prepared to kiss victory goodbye and goodnight. I suppose the Japanese call this Sayonara!

As a party, we are much too tardy for our own good. First of all, short of determining and preparing the likely occupants of our 2024 Presidential Ticket, we need to promptly investigate the sources and causes of the 313,000-plus spoilt or invalidated ballot papers that got literally tossed into the garbage bin in the 2020 Presidential Election, as stunningly revealed by Mr. Agyapong several days ago. We learn that the 2024 Poll was thoroughly rigged by the hawkish and knavish operatives of the National Democratic Congress at both the polling station and the constituency levels. According to party stalwarts on the ground, or Ground Zero, there were legions of cases where the Number-One-Spot Portrait of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was cut out of some ballot papers or found to be missing at a remarkable number of polling stations. We need to investigate and authenticate this criminal act of fraud and possibly initiate lawsuits against the criminal suspects involved.

We are also informed that these fake and fraudulent ballot papers were largely and primarily handed out to very elderly and often poorly educated eligible voters who appeared at some polling stations and centers around the country. We also learn to our ire that when many of the aforementioned category of voters got confused by the odd nature of the ballot handed to them by some roguish polling agents in the pay of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress, instead of promptly rejecting these duds or fake ballot papers, they simply folded the papers another way and ended up doubly thumb printing the same, which was what caused these ballot papers to be invalidated. A striking case in point, publicly disclosed by the proprietor of the Oman Media Network, occurred in the Winneba Constituency of Mr. Alexander Afenyo Markin. We need to set the members of the Research Department of the New Patriotic Party to work on this aspect of some of the serious irregularities that occurred during the 2024 General Election. If an active or viable Research Department does not already exist at the Kokomlemle Headquarters of the ruling New Patriotic Party, one has to be immediately established and generously funded.

Failure to thoroughly research and devise effective strategies for combatting such insufferable acts of fraudulent criminality will definitely come back to haunt us as a party in December 2024. Trust me. Then, we have also been informed by the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Assin-Central, in the Central Region, that some pro-NDC polling agents had been paid sums ranging from GHȻ 2,000 (Two-Thousand Cedis) to GHȻ 5,000 (Five-Thousand Cedis) to rig the election for their paymasters and preferred candidates, both at the parliamentary and presidential levels of the 2020 General Election. This critical piece of information also needs to be promptly and thoroughly investigated and effectively and definitively remedied. What the latter also means is that the key operatives of the NPP at the National Headquarters must be fully prepared to match these criminal strategists of the NDC boot-for-boot and pesewa-for-pesewa, if “democratic” and legitimate power in the country is not to scandalously and horrifically fall into the wrong hands anytime soon.

And, oh, I also wanted to add for the edification of the Assin-Central NPP-MP that African athletes do not generally perform creditably at the Olympic Games and other global-level sports because we are much too tardy. You see, the most brilliant and astute Olympians begin training for the next Olympic Tournament exactly one day after the latest one has ended. Most African teams and individual athletes and sports men and women, on the other hand, only begin training for the next Olympic Competition just a year before the tournament proper, at the earliest. So, why are we not winning the bulk of the medals awarded? You just make your own analysis and then reach your conclusions.

Finally, on the question of ballot rigging by operatives of Ghana’s main opposition National Democratic Congress, the answer is simple. And it lies in the fact that the Jean Adukwei Mensa-Chaired Independent Electoral Commission does not recruit its contingent staff or even permanent staff on the basis of a partisan or political party litmus test. Which is why it is extremely difficult and patently silly for anybody to pinpoint Mrs. Mensa, Ghana’s Chief Returning Officer, as the one who needs to be held solely responsible for any electoral irregularities that occurred during the 2020 General Election. The buck rests with each and every one of us. Mrs. Mensa was only the Coordinator of a National Team of Electoral Participants. Her work was only as kosher or perfect and sound as each and every one of us permitted the same.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

January 10, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]