Ivor Greenstreet
I find it morbidly offensive to hear the 2016 presidential candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) compare himself to unarguably the most progressive U.S. President of the twentieth century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, affectionately dubbed FDR.
I wasn’t born in his time, obviously, but from the available records regarding his high-minded integrity, it is quite certain that had FDR been an opposition leader in Ghana today, unlike Mr. Ivor Kobina Greenstreet, he would not have so cheaply sold his conscience to President John Dramani Mahama in the matter of the Ford Expedition payola scam the way the CPP leader did recently.
To add insult to injury, the entire rump-CPP executive hoodlum pack would collude with Mr. Greenstreet to run two of the most hardworking party operatives onto the gray margins of indefinite suspension, because Messrs.
Nii Armah Akomfrah and Ernesto Yeboah had dared to aptly, promptly and boldly impugned the leadership credibility and moral integrity of the party’s flagbearer.
In other words, other than being wheelchair-bound, from a completely different reason or cause, Mr. Greenstreet has absolutely nothing in common with the legendary American statesman. And their disparate journeys to the wheelchair, as already noted, had absolutely nothing in common.
The thoroughgoing corrupt Mr. Greenstreet appears to have recklessly drunk himself to his present physical predicament, whereas the more cognitively cogent, visionary and big-hearted President Roosevelt had been immobilized by polio, a natural disease over which he had absolutely no control.
And so the rump-CPP flagbearer would be grossly mistaken to suppose that he could suavely con his way into the Flagstaff House with whole cloths of lies. Indeed, most Ghanaians may not be as politically and perhaps even intellectually as sophisticated as the Legon Law School graduate, but they are definitely neither as opportunistic as Mr. Greenstreet nor as mentally and psychologically corrupt and bankrupt beyond redemption as the r-CPP flagbearer.
Needless to say, this sort of cynical and pathologically self-serving mentality makes it extremely difficult, in retrospect, not to side with Mr. Samuel George Nattey, the incurably foulmouthed National Democratic Congress’ 2016 parliamentary candidate for Ningo-Prampram.
About a year ago, Mr. Nettey told Ghanaians that Mr. Greenstreet, then the rump-CPP General-Secretary, had not been able to fully recognize the purportedly significant achievements of President Mahama and his Flagstaff House Abongo Boys and Girls, because Mr. Greenstreet’s wheelchair was too low positioned to afford the rider the most auspicious view and perspective.
In that incident, Mr. Greenstreet had said enough to eerily expose himself as an implacably vindictive man who primarily saw his way to the presidency as a means of striking back at his political and ideological opponents, and not for the development of the country.
In other words, Mr. Greenstreet is too narrow-minded and gratuitously bitter to be seriously reckoned as a prime or vintage presidential material, either in Ghana or anywhere else around the globe.
Indeed, sometimes this 50-year-old moral and intellectual toddler comes off as someone who is too callow to fully accept responsibility for the events that led to him being restricted to a wheelchair. And this is also where there is a great difference between him and the great American statesman that he recently attempted to blasphemously compared himself to.
It is also nowhere on record that FDR ever made a cheap electioneering campaign issue out of his physical disability. Rather, he actually attempted to hide it as well as he possibly could in order to significantly reduce voter prejudice, but even more significantly in order to let his sterling personal and public achievements speak for themselves.
Ultimately, it cannot be gainsaid that Ghanaians deserve a far better and more morally upright candidate for their pool of leadership material than a money-grubbing smooth-talking con-artist bereft of a conscience.