By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
May 27, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
The name Baah-Achamfuor does not ring like good news to me; and I hope the Baah-Achamfuor allegedly leading the group called Save NPP Now! is not the same "revolutionary" opportunist who extorted $100,000, together with the reprobate likes of Maj. Boakye-Djan, from a newly-elected President Hilla (Babini) Limann, and left the country to enjoy his bloody booty abroad. If the Baah-Achamfuor of this article happens to be related to the AFRC scam-artist, then, of course, his decision to harass the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) would not be the least bit surprising.
The fact of the matter is that in Messrs. Paul Afoko and Kwabena Agyei Agyepong, NPP's National Chairman and General-Secretary, respectively, we have two suspected terror masterminds who ought to be locked behind bars, in police custody, pending vigorous prosecution and long prison terms for the acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, the Upper-East Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party. Already, NPP executive committees from seven out of the ten regions in the country have resoundingly returned a vote-of-no-confidence in Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong. And so mere street demonstrations, while democratically sanctioned, are not going to cause the summary removal of the man whose presidential candidacy was given the "thumb-of-approval" by some 90-percentage-plus of the party's congressional delegates.
In other words, Mr. Achamfuor's so-called Save NPP Now! has absolutely no credibility and/or standing in party protocol; and so at best, the group is merely a nuisance. It is not necessary for us to delve into the legacy of the lame-duck years of President John Agyekum-Kufuor, especially the final year of Mr. Kufuor's second term in office, when an otherwise most progressive of Fourth-Republican Ghanaian leaders capriciously began eroding many of his yeomanly achievements. At least not just yet. What we can, however, say in response to Mr. Achamfuor and his Save NPP Now! group of grossly misguided agitators, is that the cold reality of the Kufuor legacy has quite a lot to do with the current internal problems wracking the New Patriotic Party.
We must also promptly and tersely underscore the fact that the legacy of the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party was not the ex-nihilo creation of one man or one personality. It is the collective legacy of every Ghanaian citizen and party member, supporter or sympathizer who played any significant role in both the policy formulation and execution in the Kufuor-led government. We must also send a strong signal for the moral education of the Communications Director of Save NPP Now! that it was not Nana Akufo-Addo who instigated Mr. Afoko and the Kumasi-Fufuo-Wolfing Mr. Agyepong to cause the acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama on May 20, 2015. Rather, it was Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong, hell-bent on scuttling the chances of Akufo-Addo at the presidency who decided to criminally overreach themselves by causing the patently brutal assassination of the former Upper-East Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party.
It is also quite obvious that having suavely hoodwinked their way into office, with the staunch support and active sponsorship of their rabid anti-Akufo-Addo principals, Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong began to assume the quixotic psychological temperament of God-complex invincibility. This catatonic state of mind is what the great Mr. William Shakespeare dramatically labeled as "Hubris." Mr. Afoko is inextricably implicated in his younger brother's criminal indictment, at least at this juncture because the NPP National Chairman's initial gut reaction to the Mahama assassination was to promptly cop an alibi for Mr. Gregory Afoko. Fortunately, available forensic evidence pointed in the diametrically opposite direction.
In essence, what we have here is a veritable criminal suspect acting as the official administrative face of the country's most law-abiding, democratic and progressive political party. Nothing could be more outrageously ironic. And this is what Mr. Baah-Achamfuor, if he had a conscience, ought to be deliberating on with his so-called Save NPP Now! associates.
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