There Was an “Asante Project” before there Was an “Akyem Project” – Part 9

On the question of what is commonly known hereabouts the United States of America as “Voter Suppression,” a staple political diet routinely employed by the leadership of the Republican Party – aka Grand Old Party (GOP) – the political strategists of the New Patriotic Party may be treading dangerously on the treacherous shoals of a terrain verging sharply on political suicide down the road, as this tactic is invariably a double-edged sword that was probably invented by the leaders of the presently main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), under the reign-of-terror watch of the late President Jeremiah “Jarry” John Rawlings.

In the Hopeson Adorye-published “Agyapadeε” Document that I have right here in front of me on my PC screen, this patently dirty political tactic is labeled with the subheading of “The Political Terrain” and sub-sectioned as 2.0. It is a double-edged sword which obviously cuts both ways, as New Yorkers are wont to say; but it also eerily reflects the apparently abject lack of confidence by the leadership of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), who do not seem to believe that their much-touted historically unprecedented social-intervention programs, including the auspicious implementation of the Fee-Free Senior High School, Vocational, Technical and STEM education system and the resuscitation of the Mahama-bankrupted John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) is resonating with the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry and the electorate at large.

If the preceding has credibility, then the real problem here has to do with the communications propaganda machinery of the New Patriotic Party, which this author and legions of other keen observers of the general conduct of the leadership of the latter institutional establishment have been pointing out for almost as long as the NPP has been in existence in Ghana’s Fourth Republic. Now, what is to be done, which this writer has observed umpteen times, in both the relatively dim past and the recent past, is for the relevant leadership of the party to ginger up the communications apparatus of the New Patriotic Party. In the past, I have suggested the establishment of a party-owned newspaper and radio and television stations, only to learn of a few selfish individuals having converted this otherwise very progressive and far-reaching ideational proposal or initiative into their own humongous profit-making enterprises.

You see, without the establishment of any formidable and well-coordinated communications system organically embedded within the party and as the foremost promoter of party activities, there is absolutely no way for the New Patriotic Party or any other party in the country, for that matter, to have a long-term staying power. Voter Suppression, in of itself, cannot be relied or depended upon to sustain the party in power in the long haul. It is at best a blotchy short-term tactic. The most recently conspicuous deployment of such crude communist tactic to criminally sabotage the democratic will of the people occurred under the watch of the previous Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress, when then-Mahama-appointed Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC), Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, who clearly appeared to be taking her marching orders from the extant Nigerian Independent Electoral Commission’s Chairperson, by the name of Prof. Attahiru Jega, rudely and brazenly defied the Wood Supreme Court, with the staunch and the equally brazen and flagrant backing of her boss, vis-à-vis the question of the legally invalid use of officially or judicially unauthorized documents to register some prospective and eligible Ghanaian citizens, largely in such electoral strongholds of the National Democratic Congress as the so-called Five Northern Regions and the Volta Region, the putative World Bank of the latter party to vote.

We also witnessed the opposite variation of Voter Suppression, called Deliberate Overvoting and Undervoting, when Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the “longest-playing” National Democratic Congress-appointed Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, appeared before the Justice William Atuguba-presided panel of Supreme Court Judicators, during the 2012-13 Akufo-Addo-led Presidential Petition, and rather cavalierly and nonchalantly informed the Wood-constituted Apex Court that the University of California, Santa Barbara, holder of the doctoral degree in Political Science – Did Yours Truly hear anybody say “Political Scam”? – had deliberately and knowingly permitted hundreds of thousands of underage and ineligible Ghanaian citizens to register to vote.

Indeed, it is very likely that operatives of both two major political parties in the country have routinely resorted to the use of underqualified Ghanaian citizens to criminally exercise the franchise, as has been widely reported by the US media to have equally occurred hereabouts, in much the same way that British scholar and political scientist Dennis Austin (See “Politics in Ghana: 1946-1960) observes was routinely done during most of the tenure of Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah. Which may very well explain the recent increasing disaffection for democratic governance and culture throughout most of the Third World. Recently, for example, this writer came across a news headline – he did not have the time to read the full details of the contents of the same – in which 53-percent of Continental Africans were reported to be staunchly in favor of the application of military force to intervene in the gross and rankly corrupt misgovernance of democratically elected governments, obviously because waiting until the next electoral season to unseat a poorly performing government was very likely to return the same set of thoroughgoing corrupt and civically irresponsible and unconscionable politicians to power.

Now, on the critical question of the internal and the logical coherence of the institutional apparatus of the New Patriotic Party, the “Agyapadeε” Document rightfully points out what the present writer has been hinting at and calling for a radical overhaul for quite a considerable while now. Which is that the current state of both the Youth Wing and the Women’s Wing of the party does not augur well for the massive rallying of voter awareness of the unarguable fact of the National Democratic Congress’ having absolutely nothing worthwhile, by way of human and national development, to offer the 35-million Ghanaian citizens currently in dire need of progressive and a civically responsible national leadership.

You see, merely overextending the already fraught and administratively exacting portfolio of Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, the Minister of Communications, to unrealistically encompass that of Ms. Kate Gyamfua, the neck-deep predatory Galamsey industrialist, for want of a more appropriate terminology, is highly unlikely to do the trick, as it were. The current Women’s Organizer of the New Patriotic Party ought to have long been summarily fired from her post and possibly expelled from the party, the very moment it came to light that she had criminally plunged at least a dozen China-made Changfang Excavators into the Birem River and elsewhere around the country, and was obviously far more interested in hogging her very powerful position in the party to literally lay the hitherto pristine resources of the country to waste, in return for her metaphorical 30 pieces of gold.

But, of course, I guess environmental protection and the general protection of human and wildlife resources in the country were never among the deck of playing cards of the country’s two major political parties, namely, the presently ruling New Patriotic Party and the main opposition National Democratic Congress. In the case of Mr. Henry Nana Boakye, the party’s National Youth Organizer, who, unlike Ms. Kate Gyamfua, is specifically named in the “Agyapadeε” Document, this young man pretty much reminds Yours Truly of Mr. Yaw Buaben Asamoa, the largely nominal former National Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party and, presently, an Alan Kyerematen propaganda goon and shill, there is a barely understated call for his ouster, having apparently made himself a virtual nuisance to the aims and the objectives of the party, except that his apparently fluky election as the NPP’s National Youth Organizer appears to have put the party leadership on tenterhooks, that is, between a proverbial rock and a hard place, meaning that Nana Boakye may very well be literally sitting on eggshells and could very well soon find himself shut out of the party’s Headquarters one of these days.

I have personally remarked, at least in the wake of his patently asinine Wi-Fi prank on the then recently resigned Independent Special Prosecutor Martin ABK Amidu, in the frenetic runup to the 2020 General Election, that this morbidly self-infatuated burly young man did not come off to Yours Truly as a politically and a strategically shrewd and savvy bloke. So, I am absolutely not the least bit flabbergasted that Nana Boakye would be cut such an unflattering profile in the “Agyapadeε” Document.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
August 9, 2024
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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