By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 29, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
He is perhaps better positioned to size up the current turmoil raging in Ghana’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). However, the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the country’s largest and most progressive party may understandably be understating the factual reality, when Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo asserts that the current political convulsion wracking the party has been blown way out of proportion. That is good diplomatic speak, and it is all to be expected from the man who used to be Ghana’s Chief Diplomat, or Foreign Minister, some 8 years ago. Nana Akufo-Addo may also be quite accurate in observing that some of the internecine animus tearing at the heart of the party, particularly at the NPP’s national headquarters, may have been planned and executed by forces outside the Danquah-Busia-Dombo family (See “NPP’s Woe’s Induced Externally” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/29/15).
Well, I am not so sure that both major factions of the New Patriotic Party can be equally said to be bona fide members of the so-called Danquah-Busia-Dombo Family/Clan. There is clear, albeit deftly muffled, evidence pointing to the fact that not all the members of the two major NPP factions believe in the inviolable iconic integrity of the patriarchal triad. In other words, there are some among either faction who do not necessarily perceive the arrangement of the names of the patriarchs of this Tradition in the order in which they are routinely presented to the faithful and the media. As of this writing, and this is the second time that I am making this reference, there is no academic or think-tank-like institution established in the collective name of all three patriarchs. For instance, there exist a Danquah Institute and a Busia Foundation; but as yet, no such establishment exists in honor of Mr. S. D. Dombo. And so it may be high time that some academic and/or political enterprise got initiated in the name of the three eponymous embodiment of the largely theoretical ideo-cultural tradition that bears their names.
What is called for here, aside from being able to effectively diagnose precisely what remote and immediate causes of the current infighting rocking the New Patriotic Party are, is the first step towards finding a radical solution to this impasse that is stagnating the onward liberation struggle against the corrupt faux-socialist hijacking of the party by sophisticated moles and political suicide bombers in the pay of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC). And this is where the leadership skills of Nana Akufo-Addo and his partisans are called for. It may, indeed, be blown way out of proportion, but it also cannot be honestly gainsaid that there exist clearly defined factions within the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition dating back to at least as far back as 1992 or the beginning of the country’s present republican dispensation. Those of Akufo-Addo generation may even want to roll back the timeline to as far back as 1979 and the so-called rift between the Victor Owusu-led Popular-Front Party, with which former President John Agyekum-Kufuor has strongly and publicly self-identified, on the one hand, and the William “Paa Willie” Ofori-Atta-led United National Convention (UNC). One can almost aptly argue that for Mr. Kufuor, the PFP closely approached the sacred and revered status of a religion. Victor Owusu may just as well be envisaged to be the preeminent cult figure in the political imagination of Mr. Kufuor.
For Nana Akufo-Addo, the equivalent of a single cult figure in modern Ghanaian politics may not be so simple, if also obviously because the three-time New Patriotic Party Presidential Candidate is, somewhat, uniquely privileged in that three of the legendary Big Six Founding Fathers of Modern Ghana, including his own father, Justice Edward Akufo-Addo, were members of the celebrated Ofori-Atta Clan. This pride of place or patrician political status has been either rightly or wrongly perceived by his most ardent detractors to be what the latter wistfully consider to account for widely perceived insufferable arrogance of the man, especially among a people and a culture that invests perceived and/or deliberately and elaborately cultivated humility with a high premium.
His admirers and supporters invariably chalk such negative perception, and opinion, of the man to the pathological envy and plain jealousy of those who simply resent the lives and personalities of the relatively wealthy and privileged. And, needless to say, Akufo-Addo is widely known to have been born into wealth and privilege. But, perhaps, what sharply differentiates the man from most of his political and ideological associates is the added fact of him having been born into a clan of well-educated men and women of remarkable renown and stature.
However one looks at the current problems wracking the New Patriotic Party, one thing is certain; and it is the fact that a lot of strategic heavy-lifting needs to be done by a cross-factional leadership of the party in an organically purposeful way, if the New Patriotic Party is to readily clinch victory at Election 2016 and survive near-certain disintegration in default. And the preceding prognosis, of course, is predicated on the assumption that both two major factions of the NPP see themselves to be equally invested in the party’s good fortunes. To achieve this quite achievable albeit indubitably uphill task, all hands will be needed on deck, as it were. This, of course, in no way means that misguided compromises ought to be tolerated. Nothing could be more unwise and politically suicidal.