By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
May 29, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
Now that "The Mighty Dwarf" has spoken, (my profuse apologies to hatchet man Jerry John Rawlings), it is time for the rank-and-file membership of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to pick up the broken pieces, mend fences and move on. That it took the totally unnecessary shedding of the blood of Mr. Adams Mahama, the Upper-East's Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, to sober up the wrangling party leadership is all the more to be lamented. In retrospect, though, the proverbial handwriting was always on the wall, direly needing to be carefully read, digested and its most salient contents constructively implemented for both the long- and short-term interests of the party.
Unfortunately, those who cannot get past their inveterate hatred for the 2016 flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party have gratuitously accused Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of attempting to vacuously "scapegoat" Messrs. Paul Afoko and Kwabena Agyei Agyepong, the respective National Chairman and General-Secretary of the New Patriotic Party. Those who have closely and studiously followed the inner dynamics of the New Patriotic Party can only chuckle and disdainfully wave off such rhetorical inanities. Somehow, the fact of Akufo-Addo's having been fathered by a man who distinguished himself academically and professionally by any credible global measure, has been essentialized into a scourge that is readily unsheathed for the jaundiced purpose of castigating the son who never had any hand in the choice of his noble parentage but, nevertheless, has often expressed pride in such heritage and pedigree, sometimes to the annoyance of those not so fortunate and privileged.
A politics-of-envy industry has even been created by the likes of retired Supreme Court judge, Mr. Francis Y. Kpegah and the rascally fortunate hoodlum lot of the Trokosi Wing of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress. On the Afoko-Agyepong impasse, for example, one notorious Trokosi Nationalist critic even suggested in an article recently that Nana Akufo-Addo was affiliated with a "non-revolutionary" ideology and party that implicitly championed democratic constitutional legalism, and so it was nothing short of an egregious error in judgment for the three-time presidential candidate to have presumed to employ "radical" and "revolutionary" means of summarily causing the ouster of these two men who, right from the very first day of their election, to the two most important administrative positions of the party, have publicly flaunted both their utter disdain and abject contempt for the party's consensual choice to lead the New Patriotic Party, for the third time, into Election 2016.
The clearly unspoken sub-text here is that, somehow, "radical" and "revolutionary" decisions are the especial preserve of the Trokosi Nationalist-dominated National Democratic Congress. Needless to say, the blowhard shills and unconscionable propagandists of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress are running darn scared, thus their unctuous and officious attempt to luridly influence the internal affairs of Ghana's largest opposition party.
Indeed, the anti-Akufo-Addo tirades are becoming increasingly quixotic and comical by the day, particularly as they emanate from the camp of the NDC apparatchiks. One narrative by a staunch pro-Kpegah critic has Akufo-Addo being gate-crashed into the Middle-Temple, the prestigious British legal apprenticeship establishment, by his father, the erudite Oxbridge-educated mathematician and philosopher, Justice Edward Akufo-Addo. And for good measure, we are told that Nana Akufo-Addo, "a troubled child," was admitted to the Middle-Temple with a "Third-Class Under-Graduate[sic] Degree." And also that the dons of the Middle-Temple were not in the habit of admitting such mediocre minds into their fold.
The irony here, as pointed out in a previous column, is that people like Justice Kpegah got the chance and privilege to attend the University of Ghana, and the latter's famous law school, because of the yeomanly efforts of an Akufo-Addo forebear like the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics, the immortalized Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah.
Now, on the critical question of the imperative need to protecting the legacies of the leaders of the libertarian Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition, Nana Akufo-Addo could not have waxed more eloquently when he called on party stalwarts to "jealously guard" and protect the political achievements and triumphs of the man widely believed to have impeded his chances of being elected President of Ghana (See "Let's Guard Kufuor's Legacy - Akufo-Addo" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/29/15). We hope President John Agyekum-Kufuor was paying sedulous attention.
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