There Has Always Been Factional Conflicts in NPP, Dear Togbe Kwami Sefa Kayi

Peace-FM’s flagship breakfast program host Kwami Sefa Kayi – aka Chairman-General – is by absolutely no means “a small boy,” not to have been fully aware well beforehand that the presently ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) has always thrived and internally revolved around at least two major factional polarities, conspicuously and respectively personified by the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, on the one hand, and the latter’s archrival and, some would even say, archnemesis, to wit, former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor.

It is an uneasy truce, for the most part, but a truce, nonetheless, that has prevented the Great Elephant’s Party, perennially bursting at the seams, from literally falling apart, largely because of the desperate collective need and the imperative necessity for a better and a far more progressive political and ideological alternative to the populist and faux-socialist present main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) – (See “Osei Owusu Isn’t a Small Boy: His Press Conference Reaction Shows There’s Conflict in NPP – Kwame[sic] Sefa Kayi” Modernghana.com 2/22/24).

In the past, whatever factional polarities existed within the Post-Danquah and the Kofi Abrefa Busia-led United Party (UP) was largely muted and very low grade, for the most part, because there was one formidable and politically dominant common enemy to fiercely confront, namely, the Kwame Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) which, in practical historical terms, was the veritable author and nurse-midwife of the hitherto splinter political groupings that remarkably formidably coalesced into the so-called United Party or the Danquah-Busia Tradition, to which latter ideological establishment, a strategically mischievous and politically opportunistic Akufo-Addo relative recently conveniently added the hallowed name of the late Mr. S. D. Dombo, the legendary leader of the erstwhile Northern People’s Party, facetiously recognized as the proto or the original “NPP” by some pundits, critics and political commentators.

It was, therefore, absolutely not completely out of happenstance or pure accident that the protocol-breaking decision by the then recently triumphant Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to select Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, at the time the widely respected Deputy-Governor – at least one of two or three of them - of the Bank of Ghana stirred up already long preexistent factional fissures among the ranks of the top-echelon leadership of the New Patriotic Party, into what might have appeared to the “New Kids on the Block” to be gaping yawns and ravines, or whatever the most appropriate expression and/or terminology may be.

The fact of the matter is that Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, Yours Truly’s old high school senior from PERSCO, or Okwawu-Nkwatia’s St. Peter’s Secondary School, never ought to have been either named or selected or elected as either the Great Elephant Party’s Parliamentary Majority Leader or Parliamentary Minority Leader by any means or stretch of the imagination. Indeed, Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu may very well be quite a knowledgeable politician, except that when it comes to the very serious business of the selection of front-row or front-bench members of any serious legislative assembly, one can scarcely go astray by selecting candidates professionally trained for the job. We are here, of course, talking about politicians with formidable legal training and backgrounds, such as Mr. Kwaku Baah, Mr. John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor and, of course, Kumasi-Bantama’s Mr. Addae-Mensah, late.

You see, being a savvy or even as astute wheeler dealer in the corridors of business or the corporate world, such as Mr. Mensah-Bonsu is widely known to be, simply does not cut ice, in Woolfian terms, vis-à-vis the selection or the election of a Parliamentary Majority or a Minority Leader. And some of us avid sympathizers of the Great Elephant Party have been advocating for the removal of Mr. Mensah-Bonsu ever since the latter was named Leader of the New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Caucus. You see, this is the one area of the political gameplan that the leadership of the presently main opposition National Democratic Congress has perennially demonstrated its relative strategic superiority to the leadership of the New Patriotic Party, and one which Yours Truly has never hesitated or missed any opportunity to promptly underscore in an uncountable number of articles written specifically for this column and reprinted or republished elsewhere, that is, until the recent strategic gaffe by “Lt-Col.” Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, the National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, entailing the abrupt removal of Haruna Iddrisu, Esq., the Tamale-South’s National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament, and the latter’s replacement with the newly minted University of Ghana economist, Dr. Cassiel Ato Kwamena Forson.

For example, we all witnessed the pathologically lethargic and the downright incompetent manner in which Mr. Mensah-Bonsu handled the watershed election of the Speaker of Ghana’s 8^th Parliament, in the wake of the skin-of-tooth defeat of the NDC by the NPP in the 2020 Parliamentary Election. For those of our readers who had not followed the highly unlikely sequence of events that led to the election of the recently retired Member of Parliament for the Nadowli-Kaleo Constituency, in the Upper-West Region, it was nauseatingly and scandalously obvious that a sheepishly deported Mr. Mensah-Bonsu had already gifted the Speaker of Parliament’s job to his publicly self-proclaimed good, old friend and mutual handwashing crony, Mr. Alban Bagbin, into whose constituency and electoral stronghold, both Messrs. Mensah-Bonsu and Dominic Nitiwul, the current Minister of Defense, had rushed, ambulance fashion, to salvage the badly listing parliamentary campaign of a highly unpopular “Parliamentary Methuselah.”

In short, under the unduly long and irredeemably compromised leadership of the Kumasi-Suame Parliamentary Representative, professionalism had egregiously and flagrantly given way to unspeakable cronyism. Kumasi-Asawase’s Alhaji Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka would shortly expose just a little but an adequate bit of what really went on behind closed doors, in particular Mr. Mensah-Bonsu’s wide-open political prostitute legs and posture that enabled a politically desperate National Democratic Congress’ defeated leadership to royally screw Mr. Mensah-Bonsu’s nominally led New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Majority Caucus.

Which is precisely and essentially why it also absolutely goes without saying that the widely reported selection or election of Mr. Alexander Afenyo-Markin, the Member of Parliament for Effutu Constituency of the Winneba Municipality, in the Central Region, as the new Parliamentary Majority Caucus’ Leader, may be auspiciously deemed to mark a salutary end to the morally depraved and the psychologically harrowing and politically regressive culture of cronyism and business as usual long-effete regime represented by the Kumasi-Suame and Breman New Patriotic Party Parliamentarian. Did I hear the Dear whisper: “Good Riddance!”?

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
February 22, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]