By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Ph.D.
The news article was too incoherent and desultory; and one wondered just what
breed of editor and/or webmaster would presume to post the same for public
consumption. It was sensationally captioned “My Life Is In Danger – Sammy Awuku Reveals” and was sourced by Modernghana.com to Citifmonline.com and dated December 13, 2012. That made the events recounted barely four or five days after the 2012 general election, and three days after Dr. Afari-Gyan's controversial declaration of
Mr. Mahama as winner of the 2012 presidential election.
What we are talking about here, as alarming as its title suggests, is patently pedestrian, knowing what I know about how politics is practiced in Ghana, particularly in the Rawlings era. I am talking about the sort of primitive politicking whereby bullies want to perennially and perpetually have their way even where all other democratic indicators point to the fact of their rough-and-tumble games being up and its being time to pick up their jaded pieces and either falling in with the times or quietly moving on with their nuisance lot.
The contents of the desultory news item was patently pedestrian because Ghanaians had forcibly endured Monsieur Rawlings' reign-of-terror for some two decades. What with the summary abduction and Mafia-style execution of high court judges and the routine arrests and disappearances of the Miss and Mister Nobodies.
Which is the prime reason why in the wake of the assumption of the reins of democratic governance by the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP), I had admonished the latter to establish a formidable militia well-equipped and poised to neutralizing any dastardly attempt by a defeated and sullen National Democratic Congress from continuing to harass and criminally dominate their most formidable political opponents even from the gray margins of opposition political culture.
You see, even as NPP stalwart Dr. Agambila recently noted with poignant acuity,
the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party tend to be too obsessed with wealth acquisition to meaningfully and shrewdly appreciate the fact that the most significant ingredient of any democratic political culture, especially where one's main opponents are hawkish thugs like the populist scam-artists of the National Democratic Congress, is the imperative need to wisely master the sterling and protective skill of political gamesmanship in order to perennially guarantee both one's economic comfort and security.
For the most part, the leadership of the National Democratic Congress clearly appears to have mastered this fundamental and salutary Darwinian art of survival, whereas their counterparts of the New Patriotic Party merely appear to envisage power as a corollary to economic acquisitiveness. In other words, all partisanship and personal peeves and animosities aside, the core leadership and membership of the New Patriotic Party may be too greedy for their own good.
I am not sure that I wholly agree with the preceding admittedly significant internal self-assessment of the NPP; nevertheless, there is a remarkable grain of truth to it. Still, I have lately come around to believing that the NPP is fast beginning to bridge the deficit, particularly as a new generation of more intellectually and morally astute leadership begins to assume a central role in the vanguard of the party. In sum, the peevish smugness that used to characterize the NPP leadership is fast becoming a relic of the past. And the latter, indubitably, is as it ought to be.
In essence, rather than cringe and feel harried, alien and politically rudderless in the very country of their birth, the Sammy Awuku generation of NPP leadership ought
to learn how to fight back with a vengeance, and then talk about the fine and filigreed art of a civilized democratic culture on even terms or, even more auspiciously, one or two steps ahead of their foes.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
March 2, 2013
###