Duffuor Says NDC Not Ready for Democratic Governance

He did not use plain words, but he clearly and boldly told it like it is within the National Democratic Congress (NDC). Which is that more than three decades into our otherwise robust and regionally coveted and emulative democratic political culture, the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-founded institutional establishment remains an irredeemable mockery of its own name and purported objective of being a respectable and an honorable assembly of “democratically” and decent-minded citizens with the common goal of the dogged and relentless pursuit of democratic governance.

“I wish to reiterate my commitment to the party and [the] grassroots; however, my concerns that the party is not ready to conduct free and fair elections is evident for all to see,” Dr. Kwabena Duffuor said the foregoing shortly after the former Atta-Mills-appointed Finance Minister hosted a standing-room only press conference to announce that he was dropping out of the party’s 2024 Presidential Primary, which had been scheduled for the next day, that is, May 13, 2023 (See “I Am Not Quitting NDC – Dr. Kwabena Duffuor” Ghanaweb.com 5/15/23).

Earlier on, Dr. Duffuor and several of his electioneering campaign advisers and campaign-machine operatives had virulently accused the party’s leadership, imperiously chaperoned by its newly elected National Chairman, “Lt.-Col.” Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, of deliberately rigging the National Delegates’ Register of the National Democratic Congress to inevitably ensure a massive victory for the putative Serial and Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the party, whose deceased globally acclaimed Founding-Father had long gone on record as authoritatively asserting that so thoroughly, inexcusably and irredeemably corrupt was Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama, that Chairman Rawlings continued to disconsolately rue the day that he and his junior-ranked cabinet associates of the erstwhile junta of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) took the epoch-making decision to summarily execute their predecessors of the Supreme Military Council (SMC-1 & SMC-2).

Chairman Rawlings’ rationale was that so hopelessly and irredeemably corrupt were the young civilians that he had personally handpicked and deliberately and painstakingly mentored with the express objective of bringing a positive and radical change to the method by which Ghana was governed, that he had come to the definitive conclusion that the country would have been far better off if relatively far more honest and morally upright senior military junta leaders like Generals Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, Frederick William Kwasi Akuffo, George Yaw Boakye and Neville Odartey-Willington, to name just a handful, had been allowed to govern the country or even been set free in the wake of the AFRC mutiny that caused the removal of, in retrospect, these largely progressive junta leaders from power.

Well, in his post-presidential primary withdrawal media confab, Dr. Duffuor significantly and instructively highlighted the fact that the present leadership of the National Democratic Congress, despotically led by the 60-something-year-old wiry-framed recent superannuated graduate of the Senior-Staff College of the Ghana Armed Forces, was “not ready to conduct free and fair elections.” Even more significantly, the former Rawlings-appointed Governor of the Bank of Ghana, our beloved nation’s Treasury, wondered loudly to the remarkable gathering of media operatives, precisely how “The Mosquito Gang” at the Kokomlemle Headquarters of the party could muster the chutzpah to call the professional integrity and administrative competence of the staff of Ghana’s Independent Electoral Commission (GI/EC) into question, come December 2024.

In effect, what the Syracuse, New York State, doctoral degree holder in Economics and Business Management and Administration clearly implied, in his post-primary press confabulation, was that short of ensuring that next year’s watershed General Election was thoroughly rigged by “The Mosquito Gang,” with the highly unlikely complicity of Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa and her crackerjack associates at the EC, the Kumawu, Asante Region, native saw absolutely no chance by which Candidate-General “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama could clinch victory fair and square.

For the most formidable party stalwart to ever attempt to vehemently and credibly challenge the twice-defeated former one-term President, the mere fact that “The Mosquito Gang” began distributing ballot papers to all 16 regions of the country without a single one of his widely acknowledged grievances concerning a heavily rigged National Delegates’ Register having been resolved, and with the flagrant complicity of the members of the party’s National Executive Council, as well as the party’s Council-of-Elders in tow and in cahoots, means that with the leadership of the National Democratic Congress at the helm of their affairs – God forbid! – there is absolutely no way by which Ghanaians could expect the reign or prevalence of justice and fair play across the land.

More so, when a remarkable majority of the most prominent and influential members of the party were in unreserved agreement with Dr. Duffuor that, indeed, the 2024 National Delegates’ Register of the National Democratic Congress had been heavily and irreparably rigged in the runup to the party’s May 13, 2023, primaries to expressly favor Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja. We hope each and every registered and eligible Ghanaian voter and patriotic and progressive-minded citizen is paying sedulous attention.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 30, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]