By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 7, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
The dismissed lawsuit in which a member of the Kufuor-Kyerematen faction of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) went to court seeking to invalidate the legitimately executed decision by the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the party, gets predictably intriguing by the day. In appositely telling off Mr. Oppong-Kyekyeku, the presiding High Court judge reportedly told the proxy plaintiff that his suit was frivolous and absolutely devoid of merit, because Mr. Oppong-Kyekyeku had not logically and significantly demonstrated that he had any genuine interest in the suit (See “ ‘Defiant’ Afoko Appointed Lawyers for NPP in Court – Tedam Fumes” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/5/15). Put another way, it well appears that the indefinitely suspended National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party put an arrant fool and completely cynical idiot – to speak less of a congenital one – up to a job for which Mr. Oppong-Kyekyeku clearly did not have the talent or falir.
For those of us who have been studiously following the Afoko Contretemps, you may even choose to legitimately call it The Affair Kufuor, the name that glaringly and gapingly stands out is that of Mr. S. K. Boafo, the man whose legal firm, we are told, was hired by the suspended NPP chairman to represent the party in a case whose plaintiff was expressly serving the interest of Mr. Paul Afoko. In other words, what we have here is a situation in which Mr. Afoko sought to play both skipper and referee/umpire of his own premier soccer league. Well, not quite exactly the same but analogically fairly approximate to what happened in Kumasi, or Asantemanso, recently. Well, I recently read on a media website that Mr. Boafo, the lawyer whose practice, or legal firm, was hired by Mr. Afoko to do the latter’s lurid bidding for the man whose brother is prime suspect in the acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, is a former Asante Regional Minister who served in that capacity under, you guessed it, President John Agyekum-Kufuor.
What I am clearly trying to get at here is that Mr. Boafo is expected to know New Patriotic Party protocol and/or political culture as well as the most knowledgeable experts of the same. And on the latter score, of course, I am thinking of legal wits and lights like Prof. Mike Oquaye, the man whose inimitable and logically impeccable acumen saved the day for the country’s most progressive political party. But, really, what brought up the name of Lawyer S. K. Boafo from my mnemonic bank was the man’s rather exuberant and pontifical proclamation in Kumasi, several weeks ago, that popular support for the New Patriotic Party had precipitously dwindled ever since Nana Akufo-Addo and Dr.-Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia assumed the reins of party leadership. Of course, like his former boss, the cat-eyed former chief resident of the so-called Jubilee-Flagstaff House, Mr. Boafo was far too savvy and sophisticated to name any names. But the semantic implications were all too unmistakable.
What I am clearly driving at here is that the NPP-NEC may have to promptly review the membership status of Messrs. Oppong-Kyekyeku and Boafo and let justice take its course, in much the same way that the blindfolded scale-wielding lady was allowed to deliberately, squarely and fairly deal with Dr. Charles Wereko-Brobby (aka Tarzan/McNasty) and most recently, Mr. Paul Afoko. I must, once again, repeat my first conviction that it is only a matter of time before the disciplinary axe falls on the generous pate of Mr. Kwabena Agyei Agyepong. It is also quite instructive that Messrs. Afoko and Oppong-Kyekyeku would choose to launch their suit at the Kumasi High Court, rather than the Accra High Court, where the grievances being litigated occurred, at the headquarters of the New Patriotic Party. Could this have had anything to do with some likely favors that the Afoko-sponsored “friendly” litigants – as in “friendly fires,” in American military parlance – had expected from the judge of a court located in the backyard of the Atwima Mafia? Or some sort of home-court advantage, in American basketball parlance?
I suppose this was what Mr. Afoko and his sponsors were hoping and aiming for. Whoever the judge was who presided over the frivolous Kyekyeku suit, God bless him/her. Now, it is for either Acting-Chairman Freddie Blay or the NPP-NEC to call in the police to keep Mr. Afoko far away from the New Patriotic Party’s Asylum Down headquarters and all the party’s offices across the country. And injunction must also be placed on the indefinitely suspended chairman’s right to use party letterheads, as well as passing himself off as the incumbent and/or bona fide Chief Administrator of the New Patriotic Party.