By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 6, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
There may be something especially sinister about the method by which Youth Organizers of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) are trained which the leading strategists of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) may need to pay serious attention to, if the Elephant Party is to have a fighting chance at the 2016 general election. Starrfmonline.com is reporting that an NDC Communication Team Member from my recently discovered paternal ancestral township of Adansi-Fomena has declared on the Kumasi-based Boss-Fm radio station that Asante Regional Police Commander Mr. Kofi Boakye has given tacit approval to ruling party operatives under his jurisdiction the right to use “cutlasses” or machetes to settle electoral scores in the 2016 general election (See “CID Pursues Bloodthirsty NDC Communicator” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/6/16).
As of this writing, police officers from the Criminal Investigations Division (CID) of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) were reported to have demanded a forensic copy of the radio program on which the rabid NDC activist, Mr. Robert Owusu, is alleged to have made the morally benighted statements attributed to him. It is widely known that the Asante Region is the foremost stronghold of the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party. We also know, per the General-Secretary of the NDC, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, that the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress is desperate to split the vote with the New Patriotic Party in Great Asante, even while jealously guarding against possible significant inroads in the hermetic NDC stronghold of the Volta Region, where recently hundreds of thousands of assault weapons – in the form of bullets – were impounded in the country’s main eastern border township of Aflao by Customs officials.
But even more significant ought to be underscored the fact that not very long ago, in the lead-up to the 2016 NDC Presidential Primary, a 45-year-old former Youth Organizer of the party’s Oyarifa Constituency, in the Greater-Accra Region, decided to break ranks with the national leadership of his party by deciding to contest the top ticket against President John Dramani Mahama. Mr. Boateng, who also described himself as a freight forwarder, had given the reasons for why he firmly believed Mr. Mahama deserved the boot as “rank corruption, gross economic mismanagement and intolerable administrative incompetence.” He would be maliciously tagged as clinically unhinged by Mr. Asiedu-Nketia and his “create, loot and share” cronies at party headquarters and summarily expelled.
Needless to say, Mr. Boateng’s decision was morally righteous and laudable in a way that makes one cringe at the swashbuckling remarks of Adansi-Fomena’s Mr. Owusu. What makes the latter’s call for bloodletting, in his virulent bid to effectively eviscerating Fourth Republican Ghanaian Democracy, of course, is his very public allegation that his intended act of savagery has the staunch backing of Mr. Kofi Boakye, the Asante Regional Police Commander. Well, there is the facile temptation to dismiss outright Mr. Owusu’s assertion as the obstreperous rants of the clinically demented, but it may strikingly reflect the political culture and stereotypical mindset of many a key operative of the National Democratic Congress and his/her supporters and sympathizers.
We need to also couple the preceding, however remote it may seem on the face of it, with the fact of President Mahama’s stationing of heavily armed soldiers from the Ghana Armed Forces in Nana Akufo-Addo’s stronghold of the Eastern Region, in the lead-up to the 2012 Presidential Election. We know for a fact that this move was far from sheer coincidence. We are studiously watching and intend to religiously report and dispassionately regale our devoted readers with our well-considered readings and interpretations of the proverbial signs of the times.
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