Build a Home for Believers in the UP Tradition: Open Letter to Alan Kyeremanten

Dear Alan,

We hope this letter finds you in good health and spirit. Before we touch on the substance of this letter, we wish to congratulate you and your inner circle on your wise decision to withdraw from the NPP’s presidential race for the election of the Party’s Flagbearer slated for the 4^th of November, 2023.

We know that this decision has been received with mixed feelings among the blue-blooded followers of the Busia/Dombo tradition. On one hand, some followers of our tradition feel that their hope that aspirants like you, Boakye Agyarko, Kwabena Agyapong, Kofi Konadu Apraku etc, would fight to hoist the flag, your decision to withdraw was a bit premature and disappointing.

To this group of followers therefore, your withdrawal from the presidential race was a betrayal of their trust and hope. Moreover, these people think that your withdrawal was occasioned by the violence and threat thereof that characterized the August 26^th contest.

However, for those of us who are steeped in the history and culture of the Party know that your decision was a culmination of several factors that have become the hallmark of the NPP today. We have no doubt that your decision was triggered by the bastardization of the noble UP tradition by those who are steering the affairs of the Party today.

While the violence, intimidation, and injustice employed to muscle you out of the contest was the immediate trigger of your decision to withdraw from the race, the remote cause was the bastardization of the values and norms of the UP tradition. This is where we diverge from those who attribute your decision solely to the events of the 26^th of August.

This is the reason why those of us with deep roots in the UP tradition have wholeheartedly embraced your decision and applaud you for it. We do this in the belief and hope that this decision will eventually afford us the opportunity to preserve the values and beliefs that defined the Party in the past.

It is time to call a spade a spade and let Ghanaians know that the UP tradition is no longer recognizable under the present leadership of NPP. The Party of Busia, Dombo, Victor Owusu and Kuffuor that metamorphosed into the Progress Party (PP), Popular Front Party (PFP), and NPP (1.0) has been stripped of the moral and ideological tenets that served it so well in the past and made it attractive to noble men and women.

The UP tradition has fallen so far apart from the core values the Founding Fathers imbibed in and nurtured disciples such as Da Rocha, Safo Adu, Appiah Minka, J.H. Mensah, J.A. Kuffuor, Agyenim Boateng and many more over the years of the tradition’s existence.

Former President Kuffuor took a calculated risk to move the Party from the Right to the Centre-Right on the ideological continuum when he introduced such myriad social intervention programs as the School Feeding Programme, Free Maternal Care for Pregnant Women, the Capitation Grant, LEAP, and the National Insurance Scheme to ensure social inclusivity.

Today, in place of this social inclusivity that led to the formation of this tradition in the form of the United Party in the first instance, has atrophied into an oligarchy by a few Ethnic Chauvinists who have ethicized the country’s politics and polarized the country along ethnic lines in the process.

Since oligarchies are a precursor to authoritarianism, the democratic ethos that have always characterized the Party both internally and when we are in power have all but diminished through the transfiguration of the current leader into a cult or demigod whose wish has become everybody’s command, so to speak.

Since its inception, the UP tradition has been known by Intellectualism as its innate attribute but what we have today is a Party that has, through its autocratic leadership, become emblematic of anti-intellectualism. The shortcomings of the Free SHS policy are the result of this antipathy toward the role of ideas and debate in today’s NPP.

The lack of intellectual rigor as far as the free SHS policy’s implementation is concerned was the lack of intellectual input with regard to the proper conceptualization of its implementation and measurement. Moreover, the lack of any financial modelling of the policy was again a function of this hatred for intellectualism.

In short, today’s NPP is no longer the Party of Busia and Dombo; either is this the Party of Victor Owusu or J.A. Kuffuor. Today’s NPP is simply, the Party of autocrats, propagandists, charlatans, pirates, braggarts and underachievers.

In conclusion, dear Alan, unlike those who think that you have hanged them out to dry with your decision to withdraw from the presidential race, we, the silent majority, are calling on you to take this opportunity to build a comfortable home for those of us who believe in the ideals, values and principles of the UP of yesteryear.

In other words, be bold and cross the proverbial Rubicon and spearhead a new political grouping or Movement that will welcome all blue-blooded UP traditionalists in the country because many of us are crying for such a home to run to.

Yours sincerely,

Acheampong Yaw Amoateng, Ph.D. (Professor Emeritus of Sociology, based in the USA)

Kwadwo Obeng Busia, Ph.D. (based in the USA).