There Is Nothing “Strategic” About Duffuor’s Presidential Candidacy Withdrawal

I read the news report in which Mr. Kwame Jantuah, described by the media as a legal practitioner, was reported to be claiming that the politically damning decision by Dr. Kwabena Duffuor to “voluntarily” withdraw from the 2024 Presidential-Election Primary, being presently held by the Johnson Asiedu-Nketia-led National Democratic Congress (NDC), was actually a “strategic move” aimed at advantageously positioning the former Atta-Mills-appointed Finance Minister for the party’s 2028 Presidential-Nomination bid, and could not help but literally fall off my chair in tears of joyful amusement (See “NDC Primaries: Dr. Duffuor’s Decision to Drop Out of Flagbearer Race Strategic – Kwame Jantuah” Modernghana.com 5/13/23).

Mr. Jantuah’s observation is, to say the least, downright ludicrous because it gratuitously assumes that the reason given by Dr. Duffuor, the former Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-appointed Bank of Ghana Governor, for promptly and unilaterally withdrawing from the 2024 National Democratic Congress’ Presidential-Election Primary would have changed four years from now. Well, any studious student or avid observer of NDC political culture can only reach the logical conclusion that the mode of conduct of the 2028 Presidential-Election Primary is more apt to get even far worse than it has been this year – that is 2024, actually 2023 – as the recently elected National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, “Lt.-Col.” Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, would have become even more comfortable and self-assuredly entrenched in his capacity as the party’s Foremost Dynastic and Despotic Elector.

Now, what a more careful and objectively minded pundit than Mr. Jantuah would have done beforehand would have been for the critic or commentator to have examined the reasons given by Dr. Duffuor for withdrawing from the 2024 President-Election Primary of the National Democratic Congress. And for those of our readers who may not have paid sedulous attention to it, the following was what the Syracuse University, New York State, Doctoral Degree Holder in Economics and Business Management had to say about his decision to withdraw from the race during the course of his widely publicized press conference a couple of days, or so, ago: “My concerns that the party is not ready to conduct a free and fair election is evident for all to see. Taking part in such [a fraudulent electoral process] would be akin to knowingly drinking from a poisoned calabash. After consulting with my support base nationwide, I have been left with [absolutely] no choice but to withdraw from the Presidential Election, as I cannot contest in an election which is blatantly fraught with irregularities, regardless of all my efforts to draw attention to [the] same” (See “NDC Primaries: Dr. Duffuor’s Decision to Drop Out of Flagbearer Race Strategic – Kwame Jantuah” Modernghana.com 5/13/23).

Now, one does not see how any major political party whose topmost leadership appears to be pathologically and intransigently steeped in corrupt, despotic, autocratic and undemocratic means of selecting its flagbearers over the course of the past 20 years, conservatively speaking, would by 2028, totally out of the blue, as it were, have learned how to play fair and inclusive in the manner in which or by which its Presidential Candidates are selected. Indeed, about the only wonder here regards why it took a very intelligent and cognitively and psychologically acute and morally puissant or upright politician and a remarkable entrepreneurial light like Dr. Duffuor so unusually long to arrive at the same conclusion that many of us reached way long before the Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) strategically transformed itself into the present-day National Democratic Congress.

And, also, precisely why did the Asante-Kumawu native take so curiously long to arrive at the morally sobering conclusion that, in fact, Dr. Duffuor had been “drinking from a poisoned calabash” for approximately all the 30 long drawn-out years that he had knowingly and, perhaps, even downright opportunistically been trucking with the kleptocratic Robber-Barons of the National Democratic Congress? Now, the good news here is that in initially announcing his interest and desire to gun for his party’s 2024 Presidential-Election Nomination, Dr. Duffuor also, either inadvertently or by design, emphatically noted that Ghana had not collapsed, as the politically cynical members and Mafia goons and thugs of the Asiedu-Nketia Gang and the Mahama Posse would have the rest of the members of the Global Ghanaian Community believe.

Which, in effect, was to honestly and courageously acknowledge that warts and all, the Akufo-Addo Administration remained very significant and managerially relevant to the socioeconomic affairs of the Ghanaian citizenry. Such acknowledgment by one of the most talented economists in the country is an indisputably credible clean political legal tender and a clean bill of the certification of the socioeconomic and political health of the country that Candidate Mahamudu Bawumia and Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum, his presumed Vice-Presidential Candidate, can confidently and comfortably use to bargain their way into Jubilee House, come January 7, 2025.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 13, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]