I have already addressed the patently insubstantial question of the apparently acute level of desperation among the seismically reduced numerical magnitude of the membership of Ghana’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) and, for that matter, do not presently intend to unnecessarily and extensively and/or expansively rehash the same here, except to promptly underscore the imperative need for the members of the facetiously nicknamed “Micro-Minority” to more studiously focus on the most pertinent factors that precipitated the scandalously messy and the massive loss of the recently concluded 2024 General Election.
You see, deafeningly decrying the number of cabinet appointees and presidential staffers so far named by Mr. John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, vis-a-vis the electioneering-campaign promise or promises made by the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, will not change the magnitude of the epic and the all-too-highly-avoidable humongous loss of last year’s General Election; neither is such embarrassingly infantile and practically ineffectual protestation apt to any less painfully reduce the unarguably self-inflicted trauma provoked by the abjectly gross lack of discipline, strategic acumen and professional competence on the part of the morbidly and the pathologically complacent leadership of the proverbial Elephant Party.
That is why it comes as absolutely nothing short of refreshing and progressively sober to hear Mr. Samuel Abu Jinapor, the New Patriotic Party-sponsored Member of Parliament for Damongo Constituency, in President Mahama’s political stronghold of the Savannah Region, healthily walkback his initial carping of the Mahama 2.0 Government for having appointed a significantly more cabinet and executive operatives, more popularly known as “presidential staffers,” than Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja had pontifically promised on the electioneering-campaign trail in the runup to the watershed 2024 General Election (See “I Never Said President Mahama Appointed 100 Presidential Staffers – Abu Jinapor” Modernghana.com 4/17/25).
At any rate, even hypothetically assuming that, indeed, a politically “Born Again” Mr. Mahama had appointed well over one-hundred ministers and presidential staffers, this would still be far less than had been appointed by both his immediate successor and, now, immediate predecessor, to wit, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Ultimately, what most matters here is the capacity and/or the capability of these Mahama appointees and surrogates to creditably acquit themselves of the mandate entrusted them by Ghana’s electorate, as the former Deputy Chief-of-Staff to former President Akufo-Addo and, subsequently, the Akufo-Addo-appointed former Minister of Lands and Natural Resources is quick to point out.
We shall, in due course, take up the equally significant and the strategically critical issue of whether it really makes any whit of any remarkable difference, whether the leadership of the still conspicuously and deservedly smarting New Patriotic Party decides to release into the public domain the findings of the Oquaye Committee Report, that was generated out of the critical examination and assessment of the myriad problems that culminated in the highly anticipated epic defeat of the Mahamudu Bawumia-led 2024 New Patriotic Party’s Presidential-Soccer Team, as one acquaintance of Yours Truly comically put it in a recent conversation.
You see, the overwhelming majority of both the registered and the eligible Ghanaian voters who “emphatically” denied the New Patriotic Party the clearly undeserved mandate to manage the affairs of the country for a third consecutive term, have absolutely no need to be availed of the details of the contents of the Oquaye Report of which, by the way, there is the overriding subject of inquiry, in pretty much the same way and manner that the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia-chaperoned National Democratic Congress decided to keep fetishistically close to its sleeves the details of the contents of the Botchwey Report.
If there are, indeed, any morally and/or strategically meaningful lessons to be learned from the Oquaye Report, such lessons, it absolutely goes without saying, had better be focused on the biggest and the primary losers of the entire enterprise. Already, we have nihilistic party poopers and double-talking Quislings and Fifth Columnists like Messrs. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong and Richard Amoako-Baah, for only two of the most obvious examples, telling Ghanaians what we have always known since the inception of the institutional establishment of the so-called Elephant Party, that only members of a certain morally and culturally acceptable religious orientation and/or persuasion have an inalienable constitutional right to be nominated as Presidential Candidates of the New Patriotic Party.
As well, the morally shameless and unconscionable spinners of such political poppycock maintain that the NPP “emphatically” lost the 2024 Presidential Election because former President Mahamudu Bawumia, the party’s nominee for the 2024 Presidential Election, had been a conspicuous and an irredeemable and an ineradicable moral and strategic failure, far less because of the strategic competence or the abject lack thereof, either personally or collectively, but rather and solely because the Oxbridge-educated Walewale native, from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region, had either been born into or voluntarily affiliated himself with the wrong religious persuasion, in pretty much the same manner that a very dear friend of Yours Truly, a former Vice-President of the Ghana Association of Writers (GAW), had almost had her candidacy deep-sixed because some of her electioneering-campaign detractors had virulently lobbied against her on grounds of being of Ewe patrimony and patrilineage.
Which is also why it comes as absolutely no surprise to any strategically objective and savvy student and/or observer of Fourth Republican Ghanaian Political Culture, that some politically self-inflated Micro-Nationalist party stalwarts would decide to break away from the Elephant Party in order to establish a more “politically progressive” Victor Owusu-like “Front” Party. Which also comes as absolutely nothing short of plain burlesque, if also because the subject or agent of secession has exhibited a far more insufferable degree of arrogance in his officially known conduct and demeanor than the main and prime target and pretextual scapegoat for his purely self-serving decision to “Butterfly” himself out of the Elephant Party. Good riddance, Koo Gyam!
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
