The Crushing Of The Up Tradition By The Akuffo-Addo Juggernaut: Part 3

The year 2022 saw a flurry of articles I penned regarding the rot and decline of the party under the steerage of Akufo-Addo and his mainly Kyebi kinsmen and women.

In two related pieces entitled “Diminishing intellectualism in the NPP is the bane of the Free High School Policy” and “The NPP Survey Sceptics”, respectively, I lambasted Akufo-Addo’s government and its praise singers like Peter Mac Manu for the lip service they were paying to the historical role of intellectuals in the party.

Historically, the role played by intellectuals in the party had served the party well in terms of the intellectual input that had always helped to enrich the party’s policies and programs, notwithstanding the perception among the electorate that the party was an exclusive club of the elite.

However, Akufo-Addo’s administration oversaw the diminishing of intellectualism because intellectualism was inconsistent with their agenda of plundering the state coffers to empower their kinsmen and women.

Under Akufo-Addo, intellectualism was replaced by opportunism and careerism, a development that subtly sowed the seed of the party’s destruction under his administration.

One classic example of the death of intellectualism was the party’s reaction to the findings of a Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) post-election survey which found that the party was losing ground among Ghanaians because of the pervasive abuse of power and its concomitant cronyism, nepotism, and corruption.

On the 25^th of May, 2024, I wrote an article lambasting the leadership for the marginalization of intellectualism in the party under Akufo-Addo following their criticism of the CDD post-election survey entitled, “Anti-Intellectualism is the bane of the NPP.”

In this piece, the rod of my anger was Peter Mac Manu who had become the personification of the anti-intellectualism trend in the party. I argued that it was a shame for a person who once occupied the positions of National Chairman and Campaign Manager respectively, to claim that a survey by a credible think tank like the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) was “mere propaganda.”

As an academic who, like many other scholars around the globe, has used CDD’s data to publish scholarly articles in reputable international journals, book chapters, and books, I know the CDD does not churn out propaganda but rather reliable and accurate data using international best practices.

One problem with the party is that political dinosaurs like Peter Mac Manu are still calling the shots in the party, and keeping the gate as it were. I recall a story about this man that is worth telling here because it’s emblematic of the attitudes that are destroying the party from within.

As Deputy Chairman of the South African branch of the party, we raised funds to support four (4) constituencies during the 2016 campaign (Nadowli-Kaleo, Gomoa Central, Ellembelle, and OkaiKwei North). When I presented the monies to the then-candidates at the party Headquarters, Mac Manu happened to be there and he complimented me for South Africa’s effort.

However, after the party won the 2016 elections and I wanted to see the president-elect about possible appointment slots for our branch following the stampede that followed his election, a cousin who is friends with Mac Manu, had to make an “appointment” for me to see the man.

After waiting for nearly two hours outside his office, to my utter chagrin, the man flatly refused to assist me in that instance when I met with him.

The backlash to the party for the marginalization of intellectuals in the party is manifold but one classic example is the problems that dogged the implementation of the party’s flagship program, the Free High School Policy since its inception until now, a situation that has led to the ongoing so-called “national dialogue of the Free SHS policy.”

The lack of intellectual rigor as far as the policy’s formulation and implementation were concerned was the failure of the Akufo-Addo and his family-based appointed technocrats and handlers to properly conceptualize the policy’s implementation.

The failure on the part of Akufo-Addo’s “family technocrats” to realize that a policy of this nature was a classic example of the social experiment that is designed to produce knowledge not only for the ruling party but for all future governments in our evolution as a modern society.

A modern society is a social order in which “science” rather than “superstition” or “tradition” as it were, is the dominant mode of explanation. Specifically, the production of knowledge such as the policy on Free High School education is a scientific activity that should have been based on accepted scientific standards to produce reliable and valid information for the politicians in charge of the management of the policy.

The role of intellectuals in this knowledge production process, therefore, is one of the most critical aspects, that is, the provision of the philosophical and substantive underpinnings, and yes, their corollary methodologies of a policy which become the basis of its formulation and implementation, which is the proper domain of politicians.

However, the marginalization of the intellectuals in the party under Akufo-Addo meant that none of these intellectual activities were conducted for the formulation and implementation of the Policy, hence the numerous problems that beset the policy’s implementation to date.

No financial model of the policy was conceptualized, measured, and tested to assess the feasibility of the policy because, under Akufo-Addo, political expediency trumped science which is the domain of intellectuals who were non-existent in Akufo-Addo’s world of piracy of state resources.

Adequate intellectual input would have ensured that a pilot of the policy was recommended and conducted before a full implementation of the policy. There was no effort to pilot the policy to give the government information about the projected costs and funding model of the policy which would have provided the baseline data for a proper cost-benefit analysis.

In other words, piloting the policy in selected schools on a random basis would have informed the government about the viability of different options for example between a phased-in and/or wholesale rollout implementation of the policy.

Akufo-Addo and his pirates were in a hurry to plunder the national purse that he promised Ghanaians that he would protect so there was no time to intellectualize anything that stood in the way of that singular agenda.

Besides writing about the diminishing intellectualism in the party under Akufo-Addo’s steerage, in 2022, I wrote two related articles to the newly-elected national chairman of the party, Stephen Ayensu Ntim who has been a long-standing friend.

The first article was entitled, “Spreading Yourself Too Thin Would Spell Your Doom: An Open Letter to Chairman Stephen Ayensu Ntim.” and the other was entitled, “The Ejisu By-Election and NPP’s Damascus Moment: Open Letter to Chairman Ntim”.

As already indicated, the first article was meant to congratulate the National Chairman following his election in 2022 after failing to clinch the position on three occasions because the Kyebi Mafia did not want him at the top because of his apparent ties to Alan Kyeremanten.

It is significant to reiterate the fact that Hon. Kennedy Agyapong some time ago opined that the NPP lost the 2024 elections in 2022 because of the deteriorating state of the party and country through nepotism, cronyism, corruption and the resultant mismanagement of the economy by Akufo-Addo and his family.

This is the context within which my admonitions in the epistle to the national chairman should be understood because the Hon. Kennedy was right about the fact that 2022 was indeed the watershed of the party’s decay in terms of corruption and economic meltdown.

In this open letter, I drew the national chairman’s attention to the fact that because of the timing of his election, he would be tempted to see his job description as one of helping the party break the so-called “Eight” which translated into winning the 2024 elections.

I told Chairman Ntim that while in principle I agreed with this implicit job description by the party rank and file because the raison d’etre of any political party is to win and keep power.

However, I drew the national chairman’s attention to the fact that Ghanaians were equally exasperated by the hardships they were experiencing under Akufo-Addo and were literally waiting to change the government by hook or crook.

Specifically, the state of the party and national decay under Akufo-Addo made the task of “breaking the Eight” a nigh impossibility, therefore wasting time and resources on that goal at the expense of party unity and reorganization to bring it back from the brink would be a wild goose chase.

My candid advice to the national chairman was that given the disappointment of Ghanaians with Akufo-Addo’s missteps regarding cronyism, runaway corruption, economic mismanagement, and the marginalization of competent members of the party, nothing short of a miracle would guarantee the retention of power by the party.

Besides the marginalization of competent members of the party who could have made a difference regarding the effective management of the national economy, Akufo-Addo was gradually destroying the foundation of the Constitution by attacking the rule of law.

Specifically, President Akufo-Addo’s national security goons were intimidating and harassing the citizenry with unnecessary arrests and detentions of those who dared to criticize his handling of the economy and the rampant corruption by his appointees.

Ordinary Ghanaians became apprehensive of the prospect of a dictatorship under Akufo-Addo, as a human rights lawyer, had fought governments in the past against trampling on human rights.

These dictatorial tendencies were creeping into our governance system under Akufo-Addo, Ghanaians but were gradually becoming helpless in the face of his reckless leadership that threw all caution to the wind.

To all intents and purposes, in his second term, Akufo-Addo essentially adopted an egoistic approach to governance in opposition to the altruistic approach by leaders such as J.A. Kufuor, Arthur Mills, and John Mahama.

Within the context of all these developments under Akufo-Addo during his second term, I told Chairman Ntim that the hallmark of the NPP since 2016 had been the politics of exclusion based on clan loyalty and the dismantling of the broad coalition that J.A. Kufuor built to win power for the party after more than 30 years in the political wilderness in 2000.

The natural extension of the factionalist tendency in the party was the exclusion of the bulk of the membership from state power with the party in power in favor of a small coterie of relatives and loyal friends of President Akufo-Addo at the zenith of his “glory” which he forgot was a fleeting moment in time.

It was this politics of exclusion engineered by the Akufo-Addo inner circle, and implemented by the president’s errand boys like Asenso Boakye, Sammy Awuku, etc. within the party that led to the emphatic repudiation of his boys by the grassroots at the Accra sports stadium Congress.

Moreover, I told Chairman Ntim that the party had already paid the price for the Kyebi Mafia-inspired factionalism and exclusion through its trouncing in the 2020 parliamentary elections where it lost its majority in the House and nearly missed the presidency.

I concluded my epistle to the national chairman by imploring him to preoccupy himself with reforming and reorganizing the party by jettisoning the factionalist tendencies and the heightened arrogance of those who had been entrusted with power.

The flip side of this task was, of course, to reconcile the divergent interests in the party by bringing on board members who had “resigned from the party in their hearts”, to borrow a line from the Hon. Boakye Agyarko when he alluded to the alienation of many party members because of Akufo-Addo’s divisive personality.

The icing on the cake of party disintegration under Akufo-Addo and his family was the ignominious defeat of the party in the Assin North by-elections and its narrow escape in the Ejisu by-election which became the subject of my articles entitled, “The Ejisu By-Election and NPP’s Damascus Moment: Open Letter to Chairman Ntim.”.

In concluding my case about why the New Patriotic Party lost the December 2024 elections, I wish to reiterate the fact that there is no need for the establishment of the so-called Mike Ocquaye Committee to find out the reasons why the party lost the elections.

The party lost the elections because of the incompetent handling of the party and the country by President Akufo Addo and his coterie of relatives and friends whom he appointed into positions of trust.

Even if Akufo-Addo possessed the necessary attributes to rule as president, the truth of the matter is that the man did not come to govern the country as every Ghanaian had expected him to do by voting massively for him during the 2016 elections.

As the Agyapadie book has now laid bare, the man came to execute an agenda to enrich a whole clan instead of governing the country. This agenda of piracy required that a myth be created around Akufo-Addo regarding his competence and abilities, however, this myth of the man’s invincibility was shattered after the December 7^th elections.

Acheampong Yaw Amoateng, PhD, is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University, Fiapre, Bono Region (He writes in his capacity as Founding Member of the New Patriotic Party).

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