Enough Blame to Go Around

When he says that he is cognizant of the fact that Ghanaians are passing through harsh economic times, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo delectably demonstrates the fact that, unlike his immediate predecessor, he is fully in touch with the grim existential realities of the proverbial average Ghanaian citizen (Read More: I Admit that Ghanaians Are Going Through Difficult Times, But It's Not My Fault – Akufo-Addo Modernghana.com 12/24/21). Actually, the harsh socioeconomic realities facing the nation and the Ghanaian citizenry at large is the collective making of each and every franchise-eligible adult-Ghanaian citizen. But, of course, the lion’s share of the blame must be apportioned to the leaders who literally stepped up to the plate and promised their fellow Ghanaian citizens Paradise and the Biblical manna and then literally turned out to have been involved in the leadership game almost exclusively for their own primary interests and those of their relatives and political associates and cronies.

And, of course, it goes absolutely without saying that while he might have exceedingly done and achieved more than his predecessors on the national development front, nonetheless, Nana Akufo-Addo cannot in any way exculpate himself from a remarkable portion of the blame. The fact of the matter is that any adult Ghanaian citizen who has actively engaged himself or herself in our national political culture has absolutely no other choice but to frontally face up to his/her responsibility for the stygian mess in which we all find ourselves on such signal or salient national development fronts as Education, Agriculture, Health, Industry and Transportation, among a plethora of other national development sectors. It is quite true that only pathologically simple-minded Ghanaian citizens can presume to put the full blame of our national socioeconomic crisis on the doorstep of President Akufo-Addo, especially in the wake of the global pandemic that is the still raging Wuhan Virus and its various mutations, such as the India-originated Delta Virus and the Dutch-originated and South African-discovered or mapped Omicron Virus.

Now, everything boils down to which of our two major political parties, that is, the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), has convincingly demonstrated that, indeed, it has what it takes to safely steer our beloved nation out of the treacherous shoals of socioeconomic chaos and uncertainty. On the latter score, the leadership of the New Patriotic Party is decidedly without a match on our national political terrain or landscape. But we are also well aware of the fact that in terms of individual and collective character profiles, the leadership of the New Patriotic Party has yet to remarkably and convincingly differentiate themselves from their relatively far more kleptocratic counterparts of the Kwame Gonja-led National Democratic Congress. Whatever be the outcome of the December 2021 New Patriotic Party’s National Delegates’ Conference or Congress will not mean much, if the leadership of the NPP fails to emerge with a far more democratically reflective mechanism for selecting the 2024 Presidential Candidate and the Running-Mate of the latter.

Even more significant, the process for the selection of our parliamentary candidates needs to be fully democratized, which means that the decidedly obsolescent and anachronistic process of using party delegates in the parliamentary primaries must be promptly discarded. Instead, this process must closely reflect the general election process for the selection of our Presidential and Parliamentary Candidates. We cannot do democracy niggardly or miserly and hope to achieve proactive and progressive results. On the anticorruption battlefront, the leadership of the New Patriotic Party has disturbingly yet to prove to the global Ghanaian citizenry that it is the better and more progressive of the country’s two major political and ideological establishments. We need constructive engagement here, not nauseatingly more of the same. Nana Akufo-Addo and the entire NPP constabulary need to demonstrate an acceptable measure of seriousness in this direction. A word to the wise….

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

December 24, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]