NDC’s Showdown Will Fail!

The leaders of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) have never accepted the credibility and/or integrity of any general election in the country in which they were beaten flat-out, beginning with the 2000 presidential and parliamentary elections, in which then-Candidate John Agyekum-Kufuor, of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) mercilessly trounced the then-Vice-President of the ruling National Democratic Congress, Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills. So, it ought to come as absolutely no surprise that the longest-reigning General-Secretary of the NDC, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, would be screaming hell-fire and brimstone should the 2020 general election not go the way of the Mahama Posse (See “Accepting Election 2020 Results Will Depend on Jean Mensa’s Conduct – Asiedu-Nketia” Peacefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/30/19).

I have already warned the leaders of the ruling New Patriotic Party to be fully prepared to battle the “revolutionary” robber-barons of the National Democratic Congress in a hand-to-hand combat from house-to-house. You see, in the Okay-FM’s “Ade Akye Abia” Morning Show’s interview granted by the former Deputy Defense Minister, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia made it emphatically clear that he and his NDC associates would not accept the results of the 2020 general election, even if the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, a distinguished stickler for the law, strictly and flawlessly played by the book. In other words, about the only way in which Mr. Asiedu-Nketia – aka Bui Dam Woyome – would accept the results of the 2020 general election, would be if Mrs. Mensa servilely kowtowed to an Asiedu-Nketia stage-managed Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) diktat.

Ironically, however, the wiry man popularly and derisively called “General Mosquito” also publicly acknowledged that IPAC was not a statutory establishment but a discretionary forum established by past administrators of the Electoral Commission to sound out democratic consensus among all the legitimately registered political parties in the country; and that as a discretionary forum, the key operatives of the EC had a constitutional right to either proscribe IPAC or decide not to actively involve the latter in any major electoral process. Well, I have news for the so-called Chief Scribe of the National Democratic Congress; and it is simply that Mrs. Jean Mensa, the erudite Constitutional Lawyer and Drafter, intends to exercise the full discretionary powers afforded her by the primarily NDC-authored 1992 Fourth-Republican Constitution.

It is also quite fascinating to hear a mischief-making Mr. Asiedu-Nketia claim that his ability to fully appreciate and approve of any methods appropriated by Mrs. Mensa, however impeccably constitutional such methods may be, shall, nevertheless, be reckoned or considered to be superseded by the personal level of understanding or approval of the NDC’s General-Secretary. Put in simple English, what Mr. Asiedu-Nketia is telling Ghanaian voters here is that the former Sunyani-East’s National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament has rights that are way over and above the authority and authenticity of Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution. If this is not the flagrant height of arrogance, then one does not know what else to make of such bluff.

Mr. Asiedu-Nketia needs to be told upfront that Mrs. Mensa did not establish the Inter-Party Advisory Committee, which the NDC’s rascally politicians appear to have used to good effect in the past. However, if the EC Chair finds IPAC to be functionally subversive of the integrity of her job and the wholesomeness of the country’s electoral process, she has a bounden obligation to have justice and fair play reign. Indeed, were immortalized English playwright, Mr. William Shakespeare a bona fide Ghanaian citizen and present with us here in our Fourth-Republican Dispensation, he would have had this terse and simple riposte for this desperate pathological bully, to wit: “Sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing!”

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 31, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]