While it cannot be gainsaid that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Presidential Candidate and Nominee for the pioneering electoral season of 1992, the late Prof. Albert A. Adu-Boahen, was a firebrand and a formidable political activist, I never for a split second envisaged Ghana’s most globally renowned historian of his generation to have a fighting chance against an autocratic and a charismatic junta leader and a presidential incumbent and a politically tenacious and more experienced and a strategically savvier Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings. Not by any measure or stretch of the imagination. And neither did the now-former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, the immediate party-flagbearer successor to pioneering Candidate Adu-Boahen have even a proverbial Chinaman’s chance of giving Chairman Rawling a metaphorical run for his money.
For starters, the greatest Achilles Heel of the latter 1992 Presidential Candidate of the proverbial Elephant Party had primarily to do with Prof. Adu-Boahen’s withering lack of “Corporate Thinking” sensibilities and pathological self-centeredness. You see, having fairly and squarely lost the 1992 Presidential Election to a strategically more formidable and disciplined opponent, out of raw bitterness bred of hyper-myopia, Candidate Adu-Boahen jejunely called on the parliamentary candidates of the New Patriotic Party to massively boycott the 1992-3 Parliamentary Election, thereby effectively resulting in exactly the sort of a “Democratic One-Party State” that both the former Chairman Rawlings and the rest of the relatively more strategically savvy leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had fervidly hoped for.
There was absolutely “No Stolen Verdict,” contrary to what Candidate Adu-Boahen would have Ghanaians and the rest of the International Community believe at the time, although the electoral process could not be forensically unimpeachably be attested to have been without any procedural infelicities, like all human endeavors all over the world. To be certain Prof. Adu-Boahen’s scandalously atrocious account of his politically suicidal behavior during the 1992 electoral season is unarguably one of the logically and intellectually weakest of his writings.
Strikingly significantly as well, the most inveterate and vitriolic critic and rival of former Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, namely, Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, terminally suffers from the same myopic and parochial self-centeredness that Prof. Adu-Boahen was widely known to be heavily afflicted with. We scandalously witnessed this in Mr. Agyapong’s unpardonably primitive and unspeakably infantile decision not to campaign for the New Patriotic Party in his own electoral stronghold and backyard of the former Assin-North Constituency; and such woeful strategic absurdity all because the blowhard multimillionaire entrepreneur had fairly and squarely lost his ungainly and anemic battle for the 2024 Presidential-Election Primary for the party’s Presidential Nomination to the far better prepared and strategically and intellectually superior and behaviorally and culturally more refined Vice-President Bawumia, which makes the seemingly pathological narcissist even a much weaker candidate for both the presidential nomination of his party and the presidency of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.
So, really, his rabidly Anti-Bawumia tirade to the effect of the Oxbridge-educated Walewale native, from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region, being electorally unprepossessing and strategically incompetent clearly applies far more relevantly to Critic Kennedy Ohene Agyapong himself than the prime target of his vitriolic rhetoric. We also need to underscore the gravity of the fact that not only is the former New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament a college dropout, Mr. Agyapong also woefully lacks adequate civility of deportment and political self-restraint. In mainstream American socio-political idiom, the 65-year-old Mr. Agyepong is not a “straight-shooting arrow.” He lacks gravitas, plus he is rather too politically unstable, volatile and suicidal in the same unarguably accurate manner that has been said of Dr. Matthew (Nana Yaw) Opoku-Prempeh – aka NAPO – the 2024 Presidential Running-Mate of Candidate Bawumia and grandnephew of former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor.
Which also leads us logically to the equally strategically critical question of the fact of whether, indeed, the former Vice-President, having lost his 2024 bid for the topmost and the most powerful job in the country to the then former President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama by more than Two-Million Votes, has any right to expect to be afforded a second shot at the Presidency by party kingmakers and queenmakers, for that matter. On the latter count, of course, it needs to also be promptly pointed out, even as one staunch Bawumia backer recently reminded party supporters and stalwarts, that in the 2016 Presidential Election, that witnessed the now-President Mahama pack up bag and baggage out of Jubilee House, having lost his presidential incumbency to then-Candidate Akufo-Addo with more than One-Million Votes, the strategically masterful Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia was the “Presidential Undercard,” as it were.
The former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana would play a forensically formidable and readily verifiable role in enabling an opportunely elected President Akufo-Addo to handily clinch a second consecutive victory, even when the closest familial associates and backers of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in particular Messrs. Kenneth (Nana Yaw) Ofori-Atta and Babriel “Gabby” Asare Otchere-Darko, inextricably mired in the globally infamous “Agyapadie Scandal,” seemed to have effectively abandoned the Akufo-Addo-piloted Ship-of-State with less than four months to the 2020 Presidential Election.
Still, my surefire and bottom-dollar bet is on the Presidential Candidacy of Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum, the Asante-Bosomtwe Constituency Parliamentary Representative, who also inimitably served as the Akufo-Addo-appointed Education Minister and unarguably Ghana’s most progressive and innovative Education Minister in more than two generations. My surefire and bottom-dollar bet is adamantly on Dr. Osei-Adutwum because the professionally decorated alumnus of the University of Southern California has unimpeachably demonstrated that he has what it really takes to practically and substantively advance the material, intellectual, technological and the cultural development of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana in ways that none of the other party stalwarts vying to succeed a strategically and creatively exhausted President Mahama and the entire leadership of the presently ruling National Democratic Congress, come January 7, 2029, have demonstrated.
And by the way, Dr. Bawumia also unarguably has what it takes to significantly move Ghana up the global development ladder index in a multiplicity of ways that cannot be credibly or creditably vouched on behalf of Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, except that the apparently sheltered life of the distinguished son of the late Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia, an Nkrumah ministerial appointee in Ghana’s First Republic, has woefully shaped the temperament of the former Vice-President such that the Buckingham and Oxford and Simon Fraser, Canada, universities-educated economist appears to have negatively impacted his decision-making pattern, such that the latter visibly lacks the optimum level of energy and spunk and spark required to steadily and effectively fight and hold off the Cash-and-Carry Populist and Faux-Socialist Leadership of the State-Capturing National Democratic Congress.
The former Vice-President’s decision to abruptly and prematurely concede defeat to a decidedly jaded and politically incompetent and vision-bereft megalomaniacal Candidate John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, on dubious grounds of preserving the peace of the country, when the criminal assault on ballot boxes, at the express command of Mr. Samuel “Sammy” Gyamfi, the former National Propaganda Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, presently redesignated as the National Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress, had been too obvious before the global community. Rather than call for the immediate arrest and the rigorous prosecution of the readily identifiable criminal suspects involved, Dr. Bawumia curiously decided to accept the patently indefensible. This is not a leader who is capable of fighting crime and official corruption in our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.
I, personally, find the Oxbride-educated crackerjack economist to be much better suited to serving as Director-General of the Ghana National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), in charge of the Ideological Brain-Trust of a Neoliberal Market-Oriented New Patriotic Party. In short, like such erudite and immortalized predecessors as Drs. J. B. Danquah and K. A. Busia, I envisage the Younger Alhaji Bawumia to be far more of a pragmatic statesman, scholar and theorist than the kind of hard-nosed and bare-knuckles politician that both the country and the party presently needs.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
