Napo’s Tag of Arrogance Has Some Credibility and Substance to It

We really don’t know that the strategists and the key operatives of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) will have any more exceptionally difficult time in selling the viability of the 2024 Presidential Running-Mate of Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, than their counterparts of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) would have in marketing the even more morally and politically daunting and relatively unsellable candidacy of the twice-defeated, one-term Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the latter political party, contrary to what Prof. Alidu Seidu would have the rest of the country believe (See “I wonder how NPP will use 6 months to persuade Ghanaians from the negative perceptions about NAPO — Political scientist” Modernghana.com 7/7/24).

We are informed that the Chairman of the Political Science Department of the country’s oldest and flagship academy, the University of Ghana, Legon, made the foregoing comments during an interview that Prof. Seidu granted Mr. Raymond Acquah, host of a JoyNews-sponsored current affairs program. It would have been more accurate, if the Legon Political Scientist had also pointed out that an even more difficult electioneering-campaign sell was the candidacy of Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, the 2020 Running-Mate of former President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, the extant Education Minister who callously and summarily revoked the age-old Teacher-Trainee Allowances, on grounds that the country was fiscally insolvent, only for Ghanaian citizens and taxpayers to shortly discover to our utter chagrin and unspeakable horror that quite a remarkable percentage of the Mahama cabinet appointees, including the then Parliamentary Majority Leader and the Labor and Employment Minister, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, were drawing home huge sums of double salaries on either a monthly or a biweekly basis.

Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama himself has recently been widely reported to have already drawn some GH₡32 million in post-presidential salary emoluments and other perks since being deservedly kicked out of Jubilee House by Ghanaian voters on January 7, 2017, although he never retired from active engagement in national politics, unlike the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings and former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor. In a relatively more functionally democratic political culture like Zambia, the outcome would almost definitely have been very different. In the latter Southern African country, recently for example, a former President who decided to return to active politics, by running for President, once again, was asked to reimburse taxpayers for all the post-presidential salary and other related perquisites that he had drawn from the public purse or the Zambian National Treasury, before he would be certified to legitimately contest in that country’s most recent Presidential Election.

In Ghana, Parliament and the Supreme Court have yet to demand a similar level of leadership accountability from the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region. These are some of the very significant and politically pertinent issues that the Legon Political Scientist ought to be civically responsibly educating the so-called floating and undecided Ghanaian voters about, and not merely what unflattering or morally offensive retorts it is that Napo or Candidate Opoku-Prempeh must have made to Ghanaians in connection with the most recent disruptions in power supply in the country apropos of which then-President Mahama had said even far worse things to Ghanaian citizens and voters in the runup to the 2016 Presidential Election.

Even so, we also vehemently beg to differ with Mr. Henry Nana Boakye, himself no total stranger to controversy and the politically malignant tag of “arrogance,” that what quite a significant number of Ghanaian citizens perceive and have publicly decried as the insufferable arrogance of Candidate Opoku-Prempeh has more to do with such positive and emulative leadership qualities as “confidence, boldness and competence,” is sheer baloney and poppycock, and the National Organizer of the New Patriotic Party is well aware of this very inescapable factual reality. To be certain, the overwhelming majority of critics who have described the son of the late Nana Sir Osei-Agyeman Prempeh, II, as a “snooty, arrogant bastard,” or some such rebarbative epithets, have almost invariably tended to be ethnic Asantes, including one quite renowned and prominent tech-savvy media operative with whom this author is personally on very cordial fraternal terms.

You see, it is insufferably indelicate for morbidly self-absorbed party machine operatives like Mr. Boakye – aka Nana B – to so cavalierly presume that all Ghanaian citizens and voters who find the behavior of Dr. Opoku-Prempeh to be arrogant and morally objectionable, somehow, do not know what they are talking about or so bitterly complaining about. Such cavalier and dismissive attitude is even more presumptuous and scandalous than what Napo has been accused of vis-à-vis his Dumsor remarks. If, indeed, it is people like Mr. Boakye who are being lined up to go to bat for Napo, then, I am afraid Team Bawumia got it all written backwards. Put into simple English: we are in deep trouble! You see, the least that one would have expected from Napo shills like Nana B, is to have offered a decent and a heartfelt and an unqualified apology on behalf of his new Deputy Boss, and then hope to have pacified some angry minds.

Instead, we have this stereotypical “Ash-Town Boy” adding fire to petroleum. Now, hadn’t we said the same thing about the then Candidate Addo “YeboaaAkuaBa” Dankwa Akufo-Addo from 2008 to 2016? And then just what happened just the other day?

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY- Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
July 7, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]