Bawumia Has Earned His Keep, Unlike Freeloading Alan Cash

It is rather downright farcical for the Butterfly Party’s self-selected 2024 Presidential Candidate whose widely alleged vote-buying graft at the 2007 New Patriotic Party (NPP) Presidential-Primary Election, held on the sprawling campus of the University of Ghana, Legon, nearly cost the life of Mr. Paul Awentami Afoko, the future National Chairman of the NPP, in a skull-bashing beer-bottle assault by Mr. Gabriel “Gabby” Asare Otchere-Darko, cousin and bouncer of then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to be so characteristically presumptuously and cavalierly disparaging the credibility and the integrity of the November 4, 2023, nationwide New Patriotic Party Presidential Primary that saw a widely tipped Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia emerge with a decent 61.43-percent of the votes cast by an excess of 200,000 party electors or delegates (See “Your 'selection' as NPP flag bearer no news; it was skewed in your favour – Alan tells Bawumia" Modernghana.com 11/7/23).

The latter was the second round of the very crowded field of New Patriotic Party presidential aspirants of at least a dozen, or so, candidates that was rationally shortlisted to some four or five candidates, including Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen, the longest-serving Trade and Industry Minister who, having espied the proverbial handwriting on the wall had, once again, predictably decided to resign his membership from the New Patriotic Party. It was his second or third resignation from the party – the very first occurring in the late summer of 2008, after he had been severely trounced by then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo – when the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-backed political steed decided that it would be either him on the topmost ticket of the party or he was not going to play ball.

And for the next two consecutive electoral seasons, the son of the legendary Oxbridge-educated Cultural Anthropologist, Dr. Alexander Atta Yaw Kyerematen, founder of the erstwhile Asante Cultural Center (1956), later renamed the Ghana National Cultural Center, Kumasi, and presently renamed the Center for National Culture, or some such nondescript redesignation, would be effectively AWOL from all party activities and the payment of membership dues, though to this day the potbellied burly man with the lumbering gait of a pachyderm vehemently denies having officially resigned from the New Patriotic Party in the late summer of 2008.

He dubiously claims to have worked strenuously behind the scenes to ensure the landslide victory of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in the 2016 Presidential Election, though not very long ago, the two-term Agyekum-Kufuor Chief-of-Staff, clansman and junior mate at Prempeh College, to wit, Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani, came public to both plaintively and almost apologetically disclose that, in fact, at least for two consecutive electoral seasons, the pair had worked studiously and assiduously to ensure the electoral defeat of the former Agyekum-Kufuor-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice and, shortly thereafter, Minister for Foreign Affairs and ECOWAS Regional Integration.

In other words, if any Presidential Candidate could be aptly described as an “Establishment Candidate,” as the man popularly known as “Alan Cash” would have the rest of the nation believe, that candidate is absolutely none other than the Agyekum-Kufuor cousin himself. After all, is it not an open secret that a lame-duck President Agyekum-Kufuor had cunningly and deliberately refused to publicly endorse his two-time Presidential Running-Mate and two-term Vice-President, to wit, the late Alhaji Aliu Mahama, in the runup to the party’s December 2007 Presidential Primary, in the dubious name of “diplomatic neutrality” because he had ostensibly and dynastically tipped Cousin Cash for this otherwise nonhereditary elective job?

Indeed, even as Capt. (Ret) Nkrabea Effah-Dartey wrote in one of his media columns not very long ago, throughout much of the period leading up to the 2007 New Patriotic Party’s Presidential-Election Primary, Candidate Kyerematen would be crisscrossing the country in a Presidential Jet or Helicopter that had been earmarked for the official use of the legitimately elected Incumbent President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. Capt. Effah-Dartey, who is also a former Deputy Minister in the erstwhile Agyekum-Kufuor Administration, also recalls one painfully memorable occasion during which an electioneering-campaign rally that he was holding somewhere Up-North literally went bust when Candidate Kyerematen suddenly appeared at the same venue in either the aforementioned Presidential Jet or a Helicopter.

So, it is rather absurd to hear the man that one blogging commentator recently described as “a sore loser with an oversized sense of entitlement and ego” luridly accuse the widely presumed Next President of Ghana of having had the party’s November 4, 2023, Presidential Primary heavily and facilely “skewed” in favor of Vice-President Bawumia. To be certain, going into the New Patriotic Party’s Presidential Primary, a two-term Vice-President Bawumia had a diddly little to absolutely nothing to prove to the 70-year-old long-time party establishment candidate who had never democratically won or held any public office, in much the same way that the Oxbridge- and the Simon Fraser-, Canada, educated first-rate economist had a negligibly little to absolutely nothing to prove to the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, when it came to getting a handle on the effective management of the country’s economy, especially in regard to the balance between debt management and the equitable spread or distribution of the scarce and the vital fiscal resources of the country for the critter comfort of all Ghanaians without regard to ethnicity, sexual orientation, ideology and religious background or suasion. Scarcely the same case could be made for Candidate John “Gnassingbe” (Ouagadougou-Nkonfem Flying) Dramani Mahama.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 31, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]