By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 14, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
The first serious breach of party constitution and laid-down rules and regulations occurred when with less than five months to the 2008 general election, Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen resigned from the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and was readily allowed back into both the membership and leadership of the party. Prior to his unilateral severance of links with the NPP, the former Ghana’s Ambassador to the United States, and subsequently Trade and Industry Minister, had mischievously misled party leaders to believe that whatever problems he perceived himself to have with Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the 2008 NPP Presidential Candidate, could be amicably resolved in no time. Then after taking the party on a wild-goose chase, as it were, Mr. Kyerematen imperiously announced at a press conference to both party and nation that he had irreconcilable differences with Nana Akufo-Addo loyalists and supporters that could not be resolved at that particular moment or in the foreseeable future.
Alan Cash, as Mr. Kyerematen is popularly known, however, let it be known that there was the possibility of him rejoining the party at a future date which he deliberately refused to name. And so the last thing that any avid student of New Patriotic Party politics expected to have Mr. Kyerematen do, scarcely four years later, after having soberly recognized the fact that he could not survive any viable political career outside the NPP, was for him not only to fully reclaim his publicly renounced party membership but, even more exasperatingly, to put himself back at the forefront of the party’s leadership and in the running for the 2012 presidential nomination of the New Patriotic Party, when he had not even begun serving any punitive or disciplinary time for callously and selfishly abandoning the party, when his contributions and efforts were most needed.
In short, all those Kufuor-Kyerematen factionalists and sympathizers now curiously and self-righteously blaming Nana Akufo-Addo for being managerially AWOL, may have either deliberately or conveniently slept through the yeomanly efforts of the immortalized Mr. B. J. da Rocha to broker peace and harmony between Nana Akufo-Addo and the Kufuor-Kyerematen factionalists, of whom Mr. Paul Afoko, the recently indefinitely suspended National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, is a key operative. As of this writing, Mr. Afoko was widely reported to be heading back to court, after having epically failed to legally finesse his way back into office. Needless to say, he is quite certain to fail the second time around, for the simple reason that the NPP’s National Council (NC), the second-highest organ of the party, has resoundingly endorsed the decision by the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC), the third-highest authoritative body of the New Patriotic Party, to indefinitely suspend Mr. Afoko.
In all this, what has been clearly and sorely lacking and that which has obviously encouraged the Kufuor-Kyerematen factionalists to ride roughshod over party constitution, rules and regulations is discipline. And discipline has been dispiritingly lax because some who have scurrilously styled themselves as “party investors” have virtually hijacked the administrative apparatus of the NPP, in hopes of manipulating the same as a means of reaping a bumper harvest in the event of the New Patriotic Party’s regaining a foothold in the Jubilee-Flagstaff House. This breed of “political gold diggers” are sworn to facilitate or even midwife the defeat of the party’s three-time Presidential Candidate, primarily because Nana Akufo-Addo’s public and unabashed espousal of a politics of fiscal responsibility and zero-tolerance for corruption runs contrary to what these “Treasure Hunters” eerily perceive to be a mordant threat to their individual and factional interests.
It is heartening and indubitably refreshing to hear NPP Communications Director Nana Akomea promise that “dissenting party members will be promptly brought to book henceforth.” The fact of the matter is that it has taken unnecessarily long for party leaders to have arrived at such a salutary conclusion and decision. But even as that tired old maxim goes: “It is better late than never.” The suspension of at least four constituency chairmen in the Asante Region, in the wake of the stabbing death of Mr. Abubakar Saddiq, a staunch NPP member and an Akufo-Addo loyalist, ought to be the beginning of bringing a halt to the bloody rowdiness that appears to have taken undue hold of the party, with a serious threat of effectively derailing the chance for the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s dirt poor and destitute for another season of good governance and economic prosperity under an Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party.