Bawumia Has No Coequal in NDC

I don’t do Facebook, so there was absolutely no way for me to have learned the quiddities of what the locally renowned Ghanaian communications specialist had said about the winning chances of Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia in the leadup to the 2024 Presidential Election. Nonetheless, I have kept an article captioned “Re: Bawumia’s 2024 Candidature NPP’s Only Chance to Break 8-Year Cycle – Lecturer Explains with Details” (MyNewsGH.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/3/21), in which Dr. Etse Sikanku, the sometime National Democratic Congress’ consultant and/or sympathizer, is profusely being apologized to by the editors and publishers of the MyNewsGH.com media portal for having inadvertently misrepresented some of the expressed views of Dr. Sikanku, who also teaches at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ), on the capability of Dr. Bawumia, the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana, in breaking the so-called 8-Year Election Cycle in which each of Ghana’s two main political parties, namely, the presently ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), do not seem to either of them be capable of wielding the democratic reins of governance past two electoral terms, which is also the maximum stay in power constitutionally allowed any presidential incumbent.

In the afore-referenced piece that I have before me, the GIJ’s Dr. Sikanku serves a quite poignant and even brilliant analysis of the performance profile of Vice-President Bawumia, one that the critic claims would be very difficult for the National Democratic Congress to beat, unless the latter political establishment “puts out/[up?] a glittering and hard to gloss over candidate[;] then the NPP would be going in as underdogs[sic].” Now, I really don’t see Vice-President Bawumia’s being reduced to the status of an underdog going into the 2024 Presidential Election, for the simple reason that while the Vice-President, also the longest-serving Vice-Presidential Candidate of any major political party in the country, would have completed two terms as the right-hand man of Ghana’s best Fourth-Republican President, to wit, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the National Democratic Congress’ Kingmakers or movers-and-shakers do not appear to have strategically afforded themselves ample time to groom a formidable challenger to a virtually “unstoppable” Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia.

By the way, the adjective “unstoppable” is the word of Dr. Sikanku. Dr. Bawumia stands to be virtually unstoppable because over the course of the past 12 years, and that is, of course, including a little over the next three years, it is the recently defeated Candidate John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, the former President, who has singlehandedly cannibalized and hogged the top spot of the presidential-nomination ticket of the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress. The preceding has promptly been made possible because of the “dynastic tradition” created by the late Chairman Jerry John Rawlings a la his infamous “Swedru Declaration,” that effectively ensured that venturing forth into the 2008 Presidential Election, democratic protocol and culture would play absolutely no significant role in who got selected as Presidential Nominee or Candidate to represent the National Democratic Congress. That, of course, meant the effective coronation of the then-former Vice-President John Evans Atta-Mills.

At any rate, unlike Dr. Bawumia who would have had the prime opportunity to build an unquenchable performance record and portfolio, on the side of the National Democratic Congress, the one semblance of a formidable Vice-Presidential Candidate, namely, Mr. Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur, late, was widely known to have been effectively sidelined by an extremely badly performing extant President Mahama, who reportedly preferred to use his Communications Director, Mr. Stanislav Xoese Dogbe, as his de facto Vice-President. To be certain, in the quite weighty and authoritative words of Mr. Alban SK Bagbin, it was Mr. Dogbe who practically served as Ghana’s de facto President in the four-and-half years that, at least on the statutory books, Mr. Mahama was supposed to have served as the substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

We also don’t see the 2020 Mahama Running-Mate, to wit, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyeman, serving in any viable electable or elective position in the runup to the 2024 Presidential Election. We all know that Dr. Opoku-Agyeman, the NDC’s 2020 Vice-Presidential Candidate, was expediently selected as a very cheap means of capturing a lion’s share of the women’s vote. Somebody may need to do the requisite assessment to figure out precisely the magnitude of the women’s vote attracted by the selection of the first female Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast as Candidate Mahama’s Running-Mate. Indeed, about the only way in which “incumbency fatigue,” in the words of Dr. Sikanku, could play any significant role in the 2024 Presidential Election would be if by the end of his tenure, President Akufo-Addo is envisaged to have performed relatively worse than his immediate predecessor at the close of the 2016 Election Cycle. Which is highly unlikely, as by all indications and indicators, so far, President Akufo-Addo appears to have come light years ahead of Mr. John “Akonfem Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama.

Nevertheless, it could be politically cancerous if Vice-President Bawumia complacently lapses into a state of lethargy dangerously verging on virtual stasis. He has come too far and for so strenuously long to allow any far less deserving competitor or challenger to give him the slip or patently undeserved defeat. He will also not be an underdog because frankly and practically speaking, the Akufo-Addo / Bawumia Administration can simply not perform worse than the Dumsor-inflected Mahama regime.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

March 27, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]