The politically and the strategically unimpeachable decision by New Patriotic Party’s 2028 Presidential Nominee Hopeful, Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum, to put his money where his mouth is, in mainstream American parlance, by literally stepping up to the plate, in American Baseball Speak, as well, by donating GH¢200,000 (Two-Hundred-Thousand Cedis) – approximately $20,000 USD – of his own money in support of the Parliamentary Candidacy of Nana Akua Owusu-Afriyie, in the Ablekuma-North Constituency’s Electoral Rerun of last year’s Parliamentary Election, constitutes a radical departure from the scandalous strategic myopia of the late Prof. Albert A. Adu-Boahen’s inexcusably self-serving decision to instigate the party’s parliamentary candidates to massively boycott the 1992 General Election, in the wake of the all-too-predictable and the well-anticipated defeat of the then recently retired Head of the History Department of the country’s flagship tertiary academy, the University of Ghana, Legon, by a strategically far more progressive, astute and eloquent and persuasive incumbent President and Candidate Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, at the time, still effectively the junta leader of the ruling Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC).
The upshot of this most flagrant and inexcusably wrongheaded decision was the creation of a strategically self-destructive One-Party Democracy in Ghana’s First Assembly of the First Republic. Ironically, but not in the least bit surprisingly, the executive operatives at the Kokomlemle, Accra, Headquarters of the New Patriotic Party, chaperoned by an intellectually and a psychologically spent Mr. Justin Frimpong Kodua, the Elephant Party’s General-Secretary, having desperately failed in their admittedly righteous cause and bid of having the Jean Adukwei Mensa-Chaired Independent Electoral Commission (I/EC) stick to an Accra High Court order demanding that only some three polling stations, out of about 19 polling stations, be rerun on Friday, July 11, 2025, inadvisably decided to go back to Bataan, as it were, by counseling both the party’s Ablekuma-North Parliamentary Candidate, Nana Akua Owusu-Afriyie and party members, supporters and sympathizers to roundly boycott the aforementioned election rerun (See “Ablekuma-North Rerun: Adutwum Donates GH¢200,000 to Nana Akua’s Campaign” Modernghana.com 7/11/25).
Now, what the foregoing obviously means is that in approximately 32 years, the executive operatives of the New Patriotic Party have yet to learn anything intellectually and strategically meaningful and politically progressive from the unspeakably wrongheaded and downright jejune and sophomoric Adu-Boahen Faux-Pas that almost effectively and permanently resulted in Ghana’s Fourth Republic becoming a virtual One-Party Democracy. Which is inescapably and perfectly good reason enough for party delegates in the upcoming primaries to seriously consider roundly voting out each and every one of the executive operatives at the NPP’s Headquarters involved or implicated in such strategically defeatist gambit out of office.
I have often stated that if the New Patriotic Party is to survive for the long haul or the foreseeable future as a viable institutional establishment, it goes without saying that the party’s executive operatives need to learn and take some good lessons from the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia-led institutional establishment of the presently ruling National Democratic Congress. For example, in terms of the Electoral College-like selection of voting delegates to determine the fate or the destiny of party presidential-candidacy aspirants, the New Patriotic Party has often perennially tended to be far less inclusive and expansively democratic than the National Democratic Congress and relatively more prone to the kind of cheap vote-buying political subculture of corruption that an overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens, both registered and ineligible voters, or even minors, have been bitterly and perennially decrying.
What is democratically more reflective and progressively far more predictive of the ultimate outcome of any imminent or impending General Election, is to have all registered and dues-paying members of the proverbial Elephant Party exercise their franchise in all primary elections, as is done and has been done in all robust and credible advanced constitutional democracies, such as was most recently done in the New York City Mayoral Primaries. You see, going by the wishes of the politically conservative and the so-called Democratic Party Establishment, the Ugandan-born, Ethnic-Indian/Pakistani Candidate, Mr. Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist,” would never have gotten elected as the bona fide Mayoral Nominee for the November 2025 Election.
But what has even more delightfully and healthily complicated matters for the so-called Establishment Democrats is the Islamic/Muslim cultural background and heritage of the 33-year-old Mr. Mamdani, whose father, Dr. Mahmoud Mamdani, is an internationally renowned scholar of African Studies, Anthropology and Political Science, and also happens to have been a lecturer of my equally scholarly Clinical Psychologist niece, Dr. Nana Yaa Agyeiwaa Amoh, at Columbia University Teacher’s College, right here in New York City. You see, having made undue and absolutely shameless political capital out of perceived exponential rise in Anti-Semitism, these self-righteous Establishment Democrats find themselves royally and completely caught off-guard in their own hitherto deftly managed visceral antipathy for New Yorkers and American Citizens of Islamic faith and persuasion. It could not be at once more “fun,” as we are wont to say hereabouts, and tragicomical as well.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
