By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 31, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
The leaders of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) are virulently vindictive, and so I am not surprised that they have decided to roundly reject the party’s own Disciplinary Committee’s recommendation that Messrs. Nii Armah Akomfrah and Ernesto Yeboah be reinstated, respectively, as the party’s General-Secretary and National Youth Organizer (See “CPP Rejects Recommendation to Reinstate Suspended Duo” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/31/16). It may be recalled that the two men were suspended by the rump-CPP’s Central Committee after they publicly contradicted Mr. Ivor Kobina Greenstreet, the 2016 r-CPP presidential candidate.
The bone of contention over which they were indefinitely suspended regarded the recent media exposé over a Ford Expedition automobile which President Mahama was alleged to have received from a Burkinabe contractor by the name of Mr. Gibril (Djibril) Kanazoe, while the former was Vice-President in 2012. Mr. Kanazoe had recently been awarded a contract to build a wall around the Ghana Embassy in Ouagadougou, the Burkinabe capital. He would shortly be awarded other no-bid contracts, including one entailing the construction of a highway estimated at the cost of GH? 82 million. Mr. Kanazoe would back out of the latter contract after a Ghanaian investigative reporter leaked what clearly appeared to have been a veritable act of bribery a couple of months ago.
The problem of Messrs. Akomfrah and Yeboah cropped up after Mr. Greenstreet publicly remarked that he saw absolutely nothing unbecoming with Mr. Mahama’s decision to accept an auto gift worth about $100,000 from a contractor who had direct business dealings with the Government of Ghana. The two young men evidently felt that their party’s leader had put the party in a bad light in the lead-up to Election 2016, and decided to do some damage control by forcefully and publicly contradicting their 2016 presidential candidate. But what may have complicated matters further was when Messrs. Akomfrah and Yeboah were also reported to have opened an investigative case against President Mahama with CHRAJ, the Commissioner for Human Rights and Administrative Justice, without the collective consent of the rump-CPP’s Central Committee.
The pair has also complained that the decision to suspend them from their posts was taken in their absence, and that they had not been offered the democratic opportunity to appear before the Central Committee to defend themselves. Maybe somebody more astute and knowledgeable ought to have apprised Messrs. Akomfrah and Yeboah that the rump-CPP, as well as the Nkrumah-led proto-CPP, was never a democratic organization. My beef with the rump-Convention People’s Party, however, regards their reason for roundly rejecting the recommendation of the party’s own Disciplinary Committee, to wit, that the Disciplinary Committee had not waited for the party’s Legal Affairs Committee to prefer charges against Messrs. Akomfrah and Yeboah before presenting its report and recommendations.
In other words, the Central Committee operatives are faulting the members of the Disciplinary Committee for literally jumping the gun by circumventing the course of natural justice. On the face of matters, the CC membership may be clearly envisaged to have a modicum of logic on their side, except that we are not told what timelines or working schedules the two committees were given within which to respectively present their charges and recommendations. In sum, should it emerge that the Legal Affairs Committee temporally neglected their charges or responsibilities, the membership of the Disciplinary Committee cannot in any way be faulted for jumping the gun.
Indeed, what we clearly see here are symptoms that are reflective of the throes of a dying party, or it simply reflects the dogged determination of some powerful forces within the party who are hell-bent on exacting their proverbial pound of flesh, in classical Shakespearean parlance. And, needless to say, it would not be far-fetched to speculate that the Flagstaff House may very well be in the details, as it were. It is all about knowing where the daily bread of the Greenstreet Gang is buttered.
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