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10.09.2018 Feature Article

NDC Is an Anti-Akan Tribal Organization, General Mosquito

NDC Is an Anti-Akan Tribal Organization, General Mosquito
10.09.2018 LISTEN

It is a damn pity and a shame that Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia is now belatedly coming to the sobering realization that his party, the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), is a party chock-full of backstabbing promoters of tribalism. What is indisputably wrong about his rather mischievous attempt to scapegoat the relatively few misguided Asantes in the NDC for purportedly being guilty of fanning the flames of tribalism or ethnic chauvinism is the indisputable fact that the Asantes in the NDC are mere cannon fodder for vote solicitation in the country’s most populous region (See “Tribalism: Tribal Politics Killing NDC in Ashanti Region” Modernghana.com 9/3/18). If one may humbly ask: Has it ever occurred to the career General-Secretary of the NDC that the Presidential-Nomination Slot of the Anlo-Ewe founded political party has decidedly and effectively become the peremptory entitlement and veritable play toy of only Ghanaians of Anlo-Ewe, Fante and Northern descent?

You see, the Fantes were brought along for the ride because the Trokosi Nationalists and their Northern-Mafia allies have long figured out that many a Fante-descended politician tends to shy away from any political party or political organization with heavy Asante presence or membership, and so they have capitalized on this unfortunate historical reality to weaken the healthy agglomeration of a unified Akan political front. There is a historical angle to this anomaly that far precedes the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), which strategically widened this chasm which was also deftly and tactically appropriated by the Rawlings-fangled National Democratic Congress, which was fundamentally established to create an Anlo-Ewe Hegemony in the country, in order to purposely counter perceived Asante political domination of Ghanaian political culture as well as what junta professionals like Chairman Jerry John Rawlings perceive to be an unsavory exhibition of Asante Supremacy.

Short of the preceding morbid reality of the psychological temperament of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, the country’s main opposition political party leaders do not seem to have any coherent or well-articulated and/or comprehensive agenda for the country. At best, the main and, to be certain, sole agenda of the NDC apparatchiks is to rob the nation raw and line their pockets and wallets with the public dole, both locally generated and foreign generated loans and development grants. And they have been quite successful at using the politics of populist sloganeering to achieve their objective because when it really comes to it, these unconscionable kleptocrats woefully lack the numbers. For example, the key operatives of the NDC have yet to seriously rally behind any formidable Presidential Candidate of Asante descent who could really give the operatives of the relatively far more diverse ruling New Patriotic Party the proverbial run for their money. Such winsome strategy is highly unlikely to happen among the crabby ranks of the NDC’s leadership anytime soon.

My own well-considered guess is that if the leadership of the very progressive Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party keeps steadily promoting and implementing its welfarist or its salutary social intervention policies and is able to discipline itself well enough in order to eschew its notoriously bad habit of smugness and complacency, we could be witnessing the healthy marginalization or “incarceration” of the NDC in the stygian dungeon of opposition political culture for the next 20 years. Indeed, contrary to what the wiry man popularly known as General Mosquito would have the rest of us believe, the ranks of the Asante Region’s NDC executive operatives are highly tribally charged not because of ethnic chauvinism. Rather, it is because NDC leaders like Chairman Rawlings, the party’s acclaimed Founding-Father; Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, late; and Mr. John Dramani Mahama have all publicly demonstrated their pet aversion for virtually everything Asante, including Asante voters and citizens.

For instance, Chairman Rawlings is on record for having once accused then-President John Agyekum-Kufuor of Asante Supremacy. This was during the 2008 internecine intra-ethnic chieftaincy hostilities in the Anlo-Ewe citadel of Anloga, when Mr. Kufuor wisely and opportunely intervened by dispatching combined platoons of police personnel and soldiers to promptly halt the barbaric spillage of blood. The late President Atta-Mills, also, while on the hustings in 2008, or thereabouts, would caustically accuse former President Agyekum-Kufuor of siting all the major cold storage facilities of the fishery industry away from the coastal townships and cities because Mr. Kufuor was too “Asantefied” and Fante-blind when it came to the implementation of progressive policy initiatives. Former President John Dramani Mahama would also virulently accuse Asantes of incurable ingratitude towards the beneficent leadership of non-Asante-descended Ghanaian presidents. He would even say that even if he were to pave all the streets and highways in the Asante Region with gold, Asantes would still not appreciate his good leadership. This is where General Mosquito ought to be putting the bulk of the blame for the widely perceived prevalent anti-NDC sentiments in the Asante Region, not the other way around.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
September 3, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]

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