NDC Can Never Become An NPP Clone

At the 39th anniversary commemoration of June 4th, the bloodiest and most morally bankrupt, in retrospect, of military takeovers in the country, the leader of the mutiny mischaracterized as a “revolution,” Flt.-Lt. (Rd.) Jerry John Rawlings, was reported to have virulently decried the loss of identity and ideological direction and moral values of the faux-democratic progeny of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), and before the latter, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) – (See “Rawlings Says NDC Turning into NPP, Now Too Elitist”Modernghana.com / CitiNewsRoom.com 6/4/18).

Chairman Rawlings was further reported to have said that the National Democratic Congress (NDC), of which he is also credited as Founding-Father, was fast taking the elitist shape of the Pre-Akufo-Addo New Patriotic Party (NPP). The fact of the matter is that the NDC has always been a populist party that has conveniently and ravenously exploited the discontent and disaffection of the impoverished masses of the Ghanaian people to grab power in order to filthily enrich its own elitist leadership in the name of state capitalism.

Indeed, any objective scholar and/or student of postcolonial Ghanaian history who has closely followed the development policies of the country’s two major political parties, namely, the ruling New Patriotic Party and the main opposition National Democratic Congress, would readily conclude, even as Mr. Rawlings himself did on the 39th anniversary commemoration of June 4th, that it is rather the NDC, and not the NPP, that has always been an elitist faux-socialist political party. According to Chairman Rawlings, without naming names, there was an urgent need for the NDC to elect or select – select is more like it – new leaders to carry forth the agenda of the party, because the current coterie of NDC leaders is too greedy, self-centered and pathologically corrupt to make any significant difference in the country’s desperate quest for development at the sociocultural, political, economic and technological levels.

Here again, as I have always maintained, if the National Democratic Congress’ leadership is as intellectually and morally bankrupt as Chairman Rawlings claims, it is primarily and inescapably because the Founding-Fathers of the party never invested any significant moral and intellectual capital into their so-called revolutionary “umbrella” political organization. The jaded but still very relevant maxim which says that: “You reap what you sow,” could not be more descriptive of the bankrupt leadership of Chairman Rawlings himself.

The fact of the matter is that both the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council and the Provisional National Defense Council were devoid of any deliberately and systematically laid out agenda for the development of Ghana. The Rawlings Posse, to a person, was hermetically focused on the hatching and implementation of ad-hoc measures. For instance, neither the AFRC nor the PNDC had any progressive health and education policy agendas, let alone an industrial or economic agenda. They were incapable of carrying out any major economic policy initiatives besides what the IMF and World Bank cooked for them in the regressive form and name of the so-called Structural Adjustment Program (SAP).

Which was why rather than wisely and progressively build upon the remarkable industrial foundation established by President Kwame Nkrumah, to wit, the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), the PNDC leaders would callously divest and dismantle nearly every industrial plant or factory established by the proto-Convention People’s Party (CPP). Thus, other than its unmistakably plagiarizes rhetorical radix or source, it is not clear just what Mr. Rawlings means, when he talks about the need for his party’s leadership to embrace “the politics of conscience.”

I mean, who recognizes the “conscientious” hallmarks of the NDC’s Social Darwinian Cash-and-Carry Healthcare Policy Initiative, which left the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian populace without access to our hospitals and clinics as a policy worth emulating by responsible leaders? Then also, who recognizes any “consciencism” in the morally and culturally regressive attempt by the NDC leadership to shoot down President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s fee-free Senior High School policy initiative as one that was practically and economically unsustainable, while the same NDC leaders criminally took home double salaries as executive appointees in the Mahama government? This is what the classical definition of “elitism” typifies. And it is some of the foregoing critical observations that have prompted some Ghanaian social commentators to call for the statutory proscription of the celebration of both June 4th and December 31 putsches.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs