Dominic Ayine Fully Represents NDC Views on Ghana Card – Part 1

It is rather absurd and ironic that having introduced and implemented the policy promulgating the issuance of a National Identity Card – popularly known as the Ghana Card – that the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority Caucus in our present Hang Parliament would be mischievously and strategically backing away from the legitimate and universal or uniformed usage of the same for the upcoming 2024 General Election. But, perhaps, what needs to be singled out for an extensive discussion is the fact that the leadership of the now-opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), who introduced this very laudable electorally evenhanded policy initiative, had proven itself, when granted the rare privilege to constitute the government of the land, of being woefully incapable of doing so.

This is absolutely no happenstance at all. You see, the stark fact of the matter is that the leadership of the National Democratic Congress does not really believe in the salutary political and ideological culture of civilized Constitutional Democracy. It is simply not in their DNA; which is why they had to hobble Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution with the odious and much-maligned Clauses of Indemnity to unjustifiably protect themselves from the poetic justice of recompense for the wanton atrocities which they perpetrated against the Ghanaian people for the protracted 10 years that they constituted themselves as a law unto themselves and the nation as a de facto “one-party” junta-run dictatorship that was headed by the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawling under the sanguinary aegis of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC).

Under the tandem tenures of both the Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress and the regimes of the late President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills and former President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, eight of the longest years in Ghana’s postcolonial history, in the latter instance, the National Identification Authority (NIA), the statutory and official issuer of the Ghana Card, was a veritable White-Elephant. I vividly recall Prof. Ernest Kwaku Dumor, the first Executive-Director of the NIA, and father of the late Mr. Komla Afeke Dumor, arguably the most distinguished, prominent, renowned and celebrated Ghanaian broadcast journalist in our time, bitterly complaining about the fact that while the Rawlings-led government of the National Democratic Congress claimed to be eager to making the distribution and the acquisition of a National ID Card a routine process or matter of course, the stark reality on the ground had loudly and clearly bespoken of a government that was merely fixated on the promulgation of the need for a National Identity Card as a populist propaganda instrument or tool. Very likely, it was primarily geared towards scoring cheap political points.

Now, we must also quickly point out the fact that Prof. Dumor had not used the preceding words in its specificity; however, the internationally renowned sociologist had meant essentially the same thing. Either by accident or design, the National Identification Authority would be flagrantly denied the requisite funding that it needed to effectively function and do so successfully. Pretty much the same “arid” situation would prevail under the 8-year tenure of President John “HIPC” Agyekum-Kufuor, as the cynical critics of the opposition National Democratic Congress became fond of catcalling the latter, and his New Patriotic Party (NPP) government. It has only been with the auspicious emergence and accession of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to the Presidency that the issuance of the Ghana Card has become a practical reality.

Whatever hiccups the issuance of the Ghana Card may be experiencing under the decidedly competent but, perhaps not altogether as effective or efficient as the NIA could ideally be, under the managerial leadership of Prof. Kenneth Attafuah, this author’s old friend and elder brother from St. Peter’s Secondary School (PERSCO), Okwawu-Nkwatia, and former Parliamentary Secretary under the tenure of President Agyekum-Kufuor, has had as much to do with the cumulative paralysis and woeful inability of the previous four Fourth-Republican governments to get this otherwise unquestionably laudable NIA project off the proverbial drawing board, as much as the apparently deliberate sabotaging of the NIA by the leadership of the National Democratic Congress who, having espied the ominous Biblical handwriting of impending seismic defeat and doom on the wall, as it were, resorted to a self-destructive campaign of urging the party’s registered members, supporters and sympathizers to roundly boycott the application process for the smooth issuance of a National ID Card to these NDC members, supporters and sympathizers.

In essence, self-serving political myopia has been strategically allowed to unwisely obstruct the smooth and timely issuance of the Ghana Card to the members, supporters and sympathizers of the National Democratic Congress’ political minority and, I guess, one could also legitimately add, the NDC ethnic minority as well. You see, to win any Presidential Election in the country, the leadership of the National Democratic Congress has had to actively, illegally and criminally recruit non-Ghanaian nationals from several of our neighboring countries, notably from Togo and Burkina Faso. Because, by and large, the NDC is a beehive of largely anti-Akan ethnic and tribal minorities who have tended to envisage access to democratic power and their vengefully or vindictively perceived “inalienable right” to blindly loot the wealth and the resources of the country via ballot rigging.

The issuance of and the insistence on the use or usage of a National Identification Card as the sole legitimate means of voting is thus understandably envisaged by these, for the most part, decidedly hostile ethnic minorities to be a mortal danger that threatens to put their National Democratic Congress beachhead onto the gray and arid margins of a political opposition for the foreseeable future. This is the main and, perhaps, even the sole headache of the Umbrella Party, as the NDC is also popularly known and called.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
March 17, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]