Kyerematen Will Be a Liability to Bawumia

I am quite certain that if he had been paying studious attention to the real events on the ground, as it were, Mr. Kennedy Osei-Nyarko, described by the media as the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Swedru, in the Eastern Region, would not have proposed the rather strategically unwise idea of having the presumptive 2024 Presidential Nominee of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, paired up with Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen, the “longest-serving” Trade and Industry Minister in Ghana’s Fourth-Republican dispensation (See “Alan Kyerematen Should Negotiate to Be Bawumia’s Running Mate – Kennedy Osei-Nyarko” Modernghana.com 9/2/23).

It is an outrageously unwise proposition because going into the party’s August 26 Superdelegates’ Congress, which was geared towards halving the number of the 10 Presidential Aspirants who had been gunning for the 2024 Presidential Nomination of the New Patriotic Party, Candidate Kyerematen and his Electioneering-Campaign Team, headed by Mr. Yaw Buaben Asamoa, the former Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party and former Member of Parliament for Adentan Constituency, in the Greater-Accra Region, had made it emphatically clear that they had absolutely no defensible reason to campaign on the achievements and the performance track-record of the twice consecutively elected Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party, because as far as the 2024 Kyerematen Presidential-Election Campaign operatives and their boss and paymaster were concerned, President Akufo-Addo and his government had achieved absolutely nothing worthy of either the defense of Team Kyerematen or strategically useful or usable as an electioneering-campaign material of which these patent internal detractors and saboteurs could be proud.

This has been the Kyerematen Electioneering-Campaign Theme and Agenda ever since the former Trade and Industry Minister characteristically tendered his resignation to President Akufo-Addo, sometime early this year, and hit the electioneering-campaign trail, with scarcely a splash, to gun for the party’s presidential-nomination trophy that he has been desperately clamoring for since 1997 or thereabouts. You see, not only are these two men politically and ideologically incompatible, although they belong to the same institutional establishment of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo-inspired New Patriotic Party; the fact of the matter is that Mr. Kyerematen is morbidly afflicted with an implacable sense of presidential entitlement that is apt to irreparably undermine the success and the stability of a Bawumia Administration, in much the same way that there well appears to have been a widely rumored ominous relationship between the late President John Evans Atta-Mills and his third and 2008 Running-Mate, namely, Mr. John “Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama, culminating in the curiously un-Ghanaian euphoric and festive celebration of the seismic and tragic passing of President Mills, by the latter’s personally handpicked presidential running-mate, to wit, the then Vice-President Mahama, as a temporally opportune intervention by an inscrutable Divine Providence with the express purpose of ushering in the first postcolonial-born Ghanaian leader.

In other words, if I were Vice-President Bawumia or a successfully elected President Mahamudu Bawumia, I could not trust my cup of coffee or tea with a Vice-President Kyerematen while I took a leak, as it were, in the men’s room or the restroom. It is also a long-held open secret that Alan Cash, as Mr. Kyerematen is popularly known and called, resigned his membership and affiliation with the New Patriotic Party, in the runup to the 2008 Presidential Election, because the Edweso/Ejisu native who claims to be of bona fide Fante descent could simply not abide a Johnny-Just-Come-Lately Dr. Bawumia’s being listed on the bottom-half of the party’s topmost ticket ahead of the weight-throwing heavyset party stalwart who had been standing on line well before the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana was issued his first party membership card sometime in 2007 or thereabouts.

For example, we have had such staunch Kyerematen Amen-Corner supplicants and touts as Nana Ohene-Ntow and Mr. Buaben Asamoa caustically castigate the very idea that the man who led the crackerjack team of world-class economists and financial experts to redenominate the total junk that was the Cedi under the tenure of the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress (NDC), would literally jump the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-proclaimed “Presidential Succession Line” ahead of The Cash Man who was present during the purchase of the zoological Elephant that eventually morphed into our present-day New Patriotic Party. In short, great care must be taken, going into the 2024 Presidential Election, not to inadvisably impose a Running-Mate on the winner of the November 4, 2023 New Patriotic Party Presidential Primary, if the presumptive nominee of the party is to have a fighting chance at ensuring that the party is not, once again, thrown into a tizzy or another avoidable long and unbearable season of stygian darkness of the kind unconscionably imposed on us by Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama, between July 2012 and January 2017.

We also do not want a situation in which Candidate Bawumia would be forced to fight on two battlefronts, namely, by having to wastefully and painstakingly explain the Anti-Akufo-Addo presidential-election campaign by Team Kyerematen to both party members, supporters and sympathizers, on the one hand, and the Ghanaian electorate at large, on the other. And then having to sell the visionary and the progressive national-development agenda of the New Patriotic Party to both the core and base of party membership, supporters and sympathizers and the members, supporters and sympathizers of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress, largely on the strength of the relatively unprecedented social-intervention oriented achievements of the twice-elected Akufo-Addo Administration. The last thing that any patriotic and progressive-minded Ghanaian citizen wants repeated is the sort of two-fronted battle that then Candidates Akufo-Addo and Bawumia had to confront in both the crises-ridden 2008 and 2012 presidential-election seasons. Allah-God Forbid!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
September 3, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]