Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom
He is perhaps the most desperate presidential candidate of any political party in Ghana today. I am, of course, talking about the career businessman who, like Mr. Donald J. Trump, of the United States and Germany, deliriously fathomed that he could use his considerable wealth to cheaply buy his way into the Jubilee-Flagstaff House. Like Trump and his political idol, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, the Elmina native brooks no healthy democratic challenge to his political ambitions.
Publicly challenged by one of the daughters of the late Ghanaian dictator, The Adwumawura, or proprietor, broke away from the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) to found and own a political machine called the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) which, in reality, is a mere clone of the rump-CPP.
Another thing that the owner and Life-Presidential-Candidate of the Progressive People’s Party has in common with the 2016 U.S. Republican Party’s presidential candidate is thoroughgoing tribalism; and I strongly suspect that the tribalism so gaily and boyishly sported by the University of Wisconsin-educated PPP proprietor is heavily tinged with ethnic supremacy.
On the part of Mr. Trump, of course, it is Aryan Supremacy, his vehement protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. What is rather curious about this longtime former rump-CPP Member of Parliament for Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem (KEEA) is the fact that throughout the vehement public demand for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of President John Evans Atta-Mills, his fellow tribesman and kinsman, this brazen political opportunist who once danced the “Yeresesamu” beat with the former University of Ghana’s tax-law professor kept a deathly silence.
Now with barely three months to the 2016 general election, the PPP’s proprietor has come public swinging. But it is largely vacuous chops about the air.
This time, he is reported to have told a teeming throng of his kinsmen and tribeswomen in the Fanti capital of Cape Coast, during a presidential campaign rally that there had been a thunderous outburst of jubilation in the wake of the passing of President Mills on July 24, 2012; and that the vanguard leadership of the National Democratic Congress had deviously and cynically capitalized on the death of their party chief to retain their stranglehold of the Jubilee-Flagstaff House (See “NDC Rejoiced Over Mills’ Death – Nduom” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/15/16).
If he had been known to be adequately endowed with great courage, the Progressive People’s Party’s chieftain would have named names, instead of lamely and “susurrusly” claiming that some NDC movers-and-shakers had thanked God for swooping down and whisking Ekumfi-Otuam’s most famous son off the most powerful podium of the land. Well, among the Akan, it is often said that every innuendo knows its owner.
There was, indeed, one pathologically ambitious Atta-Mills heir apparent who had actually called a press conference to announce to the global community that “God in His Wisdom” had auspiciously snatched the biggest SOB from among the vanguard ranks of the ruling party. He would go on to further beam with rapturous pride and pontifically declare that he was the first President of Ghana to have been born in the post-independence era.
Reading in-between the lines of his most recent pronouncements at his Cape Coast electioneering campaign rally, The Adwumawura hinted thinly at the fact that the man who succeeded his deceased kinsman had hoodwinked the proverbial members of the Abusua Dwarfs Soccer Club into sacrilegiously offering the Gonja United Soccer Club’s skipper their Number 12 jersey. Well, as the immortalized Jamaican-Ghanaian Rastafarian icon, Prophet Robert Nesta Marley once counseled: “Whomever the cap fits, let them wear it.”
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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
September 15, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]