NPP Flagbearership Is about Character and Competence, Not Membership Longevity

Having had the metaphorical rug justifiably pulled from under their shameless and vacuous entitlement rants, the Kyerematen 2024 Presidential Campaign Team operatives have now desperately resorted to some bankrupt mantra called “Personal Connections,” whereby the signal achievements of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia – Ghana’s Chief Advocate for Digital Technology – are being scandalously and mischievously heaped on the man who recently contemptuously described the very Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), of which Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen had been a key player for nearly seven years, as “NATO,” meaning, “No Action, Talk Only.”

The Candidate “It Is Now My Turn” shill further went on to irately claim that the present Akufo-Addo Administration had achieved a piddling little that warranted Candidate Kyerematen’s using the same to kickstart his already DOA (Dead-On-Arrival) 2024 Presidential Election Campaign. Ironically, but not the least bit surprisingly, another Kyerematen wag or agitprop goon is out on the stumps claiming, rather blasphemously, that it was Alan Cash, as Mr. Kyerematen is popularly known, whose “personal connections” resulted in the historic six-hour, or so, official visit that the retired German Chancellor, Mrs. Angela Merkel, paid to Ghana, during which the globally renowned and celebrated engineer laid the groundwork for the establishment of a Volkswagen automobile assembly plant in the country.

The same obviously National Democratic Congress-schooled propagandist also claims that Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s much-lauded “One District, One Factory” reindustrialization program to resuscitate the Provisional/National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) collapsed Nkrumah-created Ghana National Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), under the economically genocidal Bretton-Woods-sponsored Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), was actually the brainchild of Alan Cash. Instructively, however, the same tout does not demonstrate any forensically credible or sustainable embryonic or evidentiary blueprint of this major national development agenda as one that harks back to at least the two-term tenure of President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party, a little over a dozen years ago, in which the latter’s putatively favorite cabinet appointee had been named Minister for Trade and Industry and Presidential Special Initiatives.

We intend to pick up this subject in due course, as we come to deem the same as necessary and relevant to this most important battle for the spirit and the soul of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. We saw the proverbial signs on the wall more than a decade ago, when during the lame-duck period of the Agyekum-Kufuor Administration, the then Minister of Defense and the immediate younger brother of the extant President, Dr. Kwame Addo-Kufuor, began putting out feelers and floating the patently scandalous, if not downright counter-democratic, idea of immediately succeeding his brother, almost as if the epic battle for the restoration of a civilized democratic culture had really been about the primitive institutionalization of monarchy as the new national political order.

Back then, I vividly recall admonishing Dear Namesake Addo-Kufuor about the fact that inasmuch as yours truly personally believed that he could very well be a competent President, nevertheless, the one great problem that the professionally trained physician was the unhealthy facilitation of a leadership precedent that unwisely played into the hands of Ghana’s longest-ruling junta leader, by vindicating the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings’ long-held mantra that the Western type of democratic culture was decidedly alien to the Ghanaian and the African mindset, in much the same manner that an increasingly dictatorial and despotic President Nkrumah had grown to envisage African political culture.

At any rate, even as the Chairman of the New Patriotic Party’s Council-of-Elders, Mr. Hackman Owusu-Agyemang, recently put it even more bluntly and definitively, the very outlandish notion of pressuring any formidable Presidential Candidacy Aspirant, especially a proven and thoroughly tried and tested candidate like Vice-President Bawumia, he did not name any names, by the way, to defer to another candidate on grounds of sheer relative youthfulness, rather than the widely perceived lack of leadership preparation or inexperience, is one that rudely defies common sense and the righteous path towards our collective national development agenda via the fastest possible route. In short, the vaulting ambition of absolutely no individual politician or even a “Founding Member” of the New Patriotic Party supersedes the preeminent or the overriding need of the Ghanaian people for prompt, visionary, timely and dedicated leadership, even as we desperately struggle to overcome our presently avoidable economic dire straits.

You see, Dear Reader, true democratic leadership is about character, talent and competence, plus vision, for good measure, and not merely how long any individual presidential candidacy aspirant has been a registered member of any political party (See “ ‘There’s No Succession Plan for NPP Flagbearership’ – Council of Elders Chairman on ‘Aduru Wo So’ Mantra” Modernghana.com 6/5/23). The kind of “My Turn” mantra being irrationally promoted by the Yaw Buaben Asamoa- and Ebo Buckman-led 2024 Kyerematen Presidential Campaign, squarely belongs among the ranks of the dynastic political culture of the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress, and not the Danquah-Busia-Dombo-inspired neoliberal and free-market oriented political and cultural establishment of the New Patriotic Party.

Now, it begins to make a lot of sense why some disgruntled self-proclaimed cofounders of the New Patriotic Party and their staunch supporters and sympathizers strategically, albeit nihilistically, deserted Camp Elephant for Camp Eagle-Squat/ted Umbrella in the runup to the December 2008 Presidential Election. No, We No Go Sit Down Make Summer Soldiers Hijack Camp Elephant Once More. Hell, No!

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
June 6, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]