By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Mr. Maxwell Kofi Jumah’s admonishment to the Akufo-Addo Campaign Team to suspend the launching of the New Patriotic Party’s 2012 Campaign Manifesto is grossly ill-advised (See “Kofi Jumah Wants NPP Manifesto Launch Suspended” MyJoyOnline.com/Modernghana.com 8/29/12). The call is primarily predicated on the widely known copycat behavior of some key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), which has witnessed the NDC’s copying of such signal NPP campaign-platform planks as the Northern Development Fund (NDF) and the devious renaming of the latter as the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA).
What is important to highlight, here, is the need for the Akufo-Addo Campaign Team to relentlessly focus on the uniqueness of its policy agenda and how the latter is a seamless segue from the Kufuor agenda of some four-plus years ago with an avalanche of media Blitz-Krieg. And here, also, ought to be poignantly highlighted the fact that the scandalously cheap political mischief of plagiarizing the ideas and development of the Danquah-Dombo-Busia camp was first engineered and perfected by the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), beginning with the latter’s shameless filching of the William (Paa Willie) Ofori-Atta-proposed and formulated Free-Education Policy, originally adopted by the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC). To be certain, even the very first word in the name of the so-called Convention People’s Party had been plagiarized by Messrs. Nkrumah, Botsio and their cronies.
Fortunately, the information-famished climate of the Ghana of 1949, which enabled the Nkrumah posse to get away with such high crimes and misdemeanors is well behind us, in the auspiciously practically sense that any devious attempt by the key operatives of the NDC to facilely plagiarize the policy agenda of the NPP can be almost immediately fiercely and forensically contested in a court of law, under the firmly established statute governing intellectual property rights all across the globe. All that an aggrieved party needs to do is Google the public record regarding the originator and/or primal proponent of the policy plank in dispute.
For instance, it is an open secret that the NDC had initially vehemently challenged the feasibility of a National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) when the Kufuor Campaign Team originally proposed the same, only for the NDC to pathetically turn around after President Kufuor’s successful implementation of the NHIS to rather pettily quibble over whether premium payments on the NHIS ought to be a running perennial policy or a one-time payment policy. In essence, the NDC’s landmark identification with the callously Darwinian healthcare policy regime of Cash-and-Carry can never be mendaciously off-loaded onto either the NPP or any other political party other than its own hardnosed NDC originators in perpetuity.
Likewise, Akufo-Addo’s proposed Free Senior High School Education policy cannot be facilely and shamelessly plagiarized by the Mahama-Arthur-led National Democratic Congress in the lead-up to Election 2012, for the simple reason that too many web-documented instances of the NDC’s vehement dissent exist for anybody to deny the same and lightly get away with such vicious mendacity. And on the latter score must also be publicly underscored the fact that even the Cudjoe-led IMANI think-tank, which proudly claims to be the best of its kind in Ghana and, in fact, the entire West African sub-region, vehemently impugned the feasibility of the Akufo-Addo free-education policy with extensive policy analysis of the same which is readily accessible to any interested student and/or scholar of the same.
Back then, I vividly recall questioning whether the IMANI operatives had either been bullied by some key NDC hacks into abrupt and uncharacteristic submission or they had simply been bought out of their conscience with a fat wad of kick-back money.
What is rather disturbing, for one ready instance, though, is the fact that it took former Vice-President Aliu Mahama so long to come around to publicly endorsing the Akufo-Addo Free High School Education policy, just as, I firmly believe, it took former President John Agyekum-Kufuor rather too long to come around to publicly recognizing the flagrant mischief and nihilistic senselessness of the decision by the Afari-Gyan headed Electoral Commission of creating 45 additional parliamentary constituencies, with barely three months to Election 2012.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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