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Yesterday, June 12 marked exactly 68 years when the CPP was founded. It was at Saltpond, after a crucial UGCC meeting that saw the demoted General Secretary to Treasurer tender in his resignation grudgingly. ‘The old order changed, yielding place to new’ – the birth of the founding party of Ghana.
Kwame Nkrumah’s resignation was the Youth’s call. In the end, he owned it and together they built a formidable force that became the greatest, so far, winsome political party in Ghana’s history. She won the first properly organized popular elections in 1951 and all the subsequent ones till the sad overthrow of February 24, 1966.
Remnants of the tradition after 13 years of staying in the wilderness could reorganize under a new banner of PNP to win the most transparent election of 1979 both at the Parliamentary and Presidential polls. Unfortunately, this subsequent victory was short lived as they became the only tradition to suffer a second brutal military overthrow under 27months in office.
Perhaps the activity of the PNDC more than anything else deliberately orchestrated the division, decline and great fall of the CPP tradition. Today, the CPP exist merely in name on a few lips in any serious political discussion. That giant Party that heralded the decolonization process in Africa has no single representation in Ghana’s Legislative Assembly which it vastly occupied in the founding days.
A study of the Presidential Results from 1992 demonstrate the pity of the once dominant party in the unending traverse of poor scores lower a decent mark. Some Historians and Political pundits predict that the Party might never be able to rise to its past glory.
The worst part of the CPP conundrum is the failure of leadership to live her mandate as the vanguard of the political consciousness of the nation. The CPP is dead silent as an institution on the many marauding issues confronting Ghana. A party that once occupied the minds of the young and the old, men and women, read and unread, strong and weak, religious and unreligious has become, at best, a pale shadow of itself. Individual members have been trying frantically to do their best but how could all that coalesce to form a meaningful focused unit?
The answer may come from revolution that can cause an insurrection like a rapture to capture the imagination of many a Ghanaian who appears disappointed with the political leadership of today and is desperately looking for some hope from wherever it may come.
TNF can conclude that the principles that founded the CPP are more than needed in Ghana today – Love and Fear of God; Love of Country; Love of Work; Right to Self-determination and full control of our natural resources; Discipline and Obedience that structures well-built societies; Punctuality; Comradeship, Neighbourliness and Responsible Citizenship; Protection of State Property and Public good etc.