By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 6, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
I have often wondered why any reasonably well-educated Ghanaian citizen would want to truck with such splinter political parties as the People’s National Convention (PNC), the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP), the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) and the Great Consolidated People’s Party (GCPP). There may be quite a few more of these “fried rice and Fanta parties,” as one cynical critic sarcastically put it, recently, that are properly speaking veritable pressure groups almost invariably led by pathological megalomaniacs and egomaniacs than I can readily recall presently.
At any rate, let me take this prime opportunity to heartily congratulate Dr. Abu Sakara, the 2012 Presidential Candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party, for having finally seen the proverbial light and decided to effectively sever all links with the hulking mess of an embarrassing political excuse that is the rump-Convention People’s Party. In splitting from the latter “concert party,” Dr. Sakara, by the way, was only following a precedent paradoxically set by President Kwame Nkrumah nearly sixty-seven (67) years ago.
But what is even more fascinating here is the fact that Dr. Sakara’s at once landmark and auspicious resignation of his membership from the rump-CPP comes barely a couple of months, or perhaps even less, since yours truly publicly indicated in one of his columns that he would be willing to endorse the presidential candidacy of this most erudite of Ghanaian technocrats whose pragmatic sense of the urgent need to seriously and rapidly advance the political culture of our beloved country far and away from the sort of infantile sloganeering of the key operatives of the rump-Convention People’s Party, is nothing short of the classily admirable.
Indeed, it has often been said that any radical political operative who persists in his radicalism past age 40 must be a clinical cretin or plain idiot. Well, it took him quite a bit past 40 to come to the sobering realization that beyond pure and abject narcissism, the proprietary leadership of the rump-Convention People’s Party is merely navigating the byzantine and decidedly Stygian shoals of our post-modernist 21st century political waters with an 18th century skiff. Now, that is not something really worthwhile to write one’s folks at home about.
We shall shortly get around to fully discussing the significant implications of the auspicious severance of Dr. Sakara’s ties with the hopeless political and ideological mirage that is the rump-Convention People’s Party. Thus far, only one of the scions of the infamous tyrant and faux-socialist dictator has come to the realistic and foresighted assessment and conclusion that the Convention People’s Party, both then and now, is decidedly an immutable relic of a bygone era with little relevance for our modern political culture and climate. In sum, Dr. Sakara’s heart is absolutely in the right place, regardless of what cynics and some of the mentally retarded rump-CPP fanatics may say.
Like the Musama Disco Cristo Church (MDCC), whose political wing the CPP ineluctably appears to be, at least as exemplified by the hustler likes of Mr. Ali Masmadi Jehu-Appiah, and as well categorically stated by Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, the CPP is the bona fide heirloom of the Nkrumah Family. If you, my dear reader, have any doubts about the preceding first-hand observation, you may want to compare notes with Dr. Onsy Nathan Kwame Nkrumah. Well, true to my promise, I have decided to hereby endorse Dr. Sakara as my third choice, after Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia, but my second choice of Presidential Candidate for Election 2016.
I even have this tentative suggestion for the name of his ideological vehicle, in case Dr. Sakara is in need of one. It is called the National Interest Alliance (NIA). And it is squarely based on a reading of his reasons for calling it quits with the rump-Convention People’s Party and his very laudable decision to go solo. The fact of the matter is that with our kind of postcolonial political culture, about the only way of having a fighting chance at the polls is to have a well-organized and cohesive institutional vehicle as a back-wind to one’s political masts.
For the likes of Mr. Hassan Ayariga – I understand the man recently acquired some sort of doctorate – riding a long-shot political steed like the People’s National Convention, even as KNUST political scientist Dr. Richard Amoako-Baah poignantly put it the other day, is to use such minor political vehicle as a lucrative appendage of either of the country’s major political parties. Which was precisely what Mr. Ayariga did in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, when he so effectively ran what clearly amounted to a political interference for the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress at the expense of Nana Akufo-Addo, the main opposition New Patriotic Party’s flagbearer (See “Ayariga NDC Appendage – Amoako-Baah” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/14/15).
And it may well have paid some huge dividends for Mr. Hassan Ayariga, whose younger brother, Mahama, has served both inside the Mahama Flagstaff House and in a couple of portfolios. Presently, if memory serves me accurately, Mahama Ayariga serves as Minister for the Environment, Science and Technology. According to the renowned former Head of the Political Science Department at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, such cynical abuse of his position as leader of the People’s National Convention may well have contributed to Hassan Ayariga’s precipitous loss of the pride of place at the party’s 2016 presidential primary to Dr. Edward Mahama, the five-time PNC’s presidential candidate.
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