It is not clear to me precisely what he means, when the former Director of the Ghana School of Law, Mr. Kwaku Ansa Asare, smugly and cavalierly asserts that the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) has been plunged into chaos and a leadership crisis because several prominent members and some key operatives of the proverbial Elephant Party have passed on in recent months or years (See “There Is Leadership Crisis in NPP after the Deaths of Some Prominent People – Ansa Asare” Modernghana.com 6/28/25).
It cannot be gainsaid that in reality, it is actually the presently ruling political establishment of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) that has recently lost quite a significant number of some of its most prominent members and key operatives, including Mr. Joseph Ade-Coker, the former Greater-Accra Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, and, of course, former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, the globally acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress, as well as, of course, the latter’s former Arch-Lieutenant and immediate successor to the leadership of the party and former President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills, as well as the country’s longest-serving Finance and Economic-Planning Minister, Prof. Kwesi Botchwey.
Now, what many avid observers and pundits of Fourth-Republican Ghana’s chaotic democratic political culture incontrovertibly know for a fact and have also not failed or hesitated for a split-second to publicly acknowledge and bitterly lament, is the fact that relatively speaking, the National Democratic Congress has always operated with a kind of “Military Discipline” that is sorely lacking within the presently main opposition New Patriotic Party constabulary, that was obviously infused into the National Democratic Congress by the Founding-Father of the latter political and institutional establishment, a former Ghana Air Force’s Flight-Lieutenant and the longest-reigning junta leader and sanguinary and extortionate military dictator.
Even more poignant is the fact that, for good or ill, the leadership of the National Democratic Congress has not hesitated for a nanosecond to weed out members and operatives of the party who have been perceived by the topmost leadership not to be teamplayers and whose personal and moral conduct has been envisaged to be strategically inimical to party cohesion and single-mindedness or uniformity of purpose, such as the 2016 summary expulsion of Mr. George Boateng, the Oyarefa Constituency’s former District Organizer, in the Greater-Accra Region, who boldly and publicly declared his intention to fiercely challenge a then incumbent President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama for the party’s Presidential Nomination that very year.
The party, at the time and still, firmly in the grips of and hermetically controlled by the then General-Secretary, Mr. Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, that characteristically and single-mindedly decided that his legion leadership foibles and all, notwithstanding, Candidate Mahama would still represent the National Democratic Congress as the unopposed Presidential Nominee of the latter institutional establishment.
On the other hand, for some weird and bizarre reason or reasons, the leadership of the self-proclaimed Neoliberal and Market-Economy Oriented New Patriotic Party has tended to gloat and pride themselves in the patently inglorious and ignoble fact of being particularly and almost exceptionally tolerant of rancorous dissent and virtual chaos in ways that have often tended to bring the institutional establishment of The Mighty Elephant dangerously to the brink of fractious fragmentation in ways that have almost effectively collapsed the party, such as we all witnessed barely two weeks into the very first term of the twice consecutively elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, when Messrs. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, the former Assin-North and, subsequently, Assin-Central New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament, and the latter’s equally rowdy and rambunctious protege and former Hip-Life act, Kwame Asare Obeng – aka A-Plus – almost stampeded the party and its newly elected and recently inaugurated Akufo-Addo government to the brink of effective collapse and back onto the arid margins of opposition perdition.
And all this was simply and primarily because these two veritable “Greedy Bastards” had allowed their inordinate and insatiable greed for juicy contractual concessions and extortions to inadvisably eclipse the greater good of both the party and the nation at large. Today, the man who myopically, scandalously and flatly refused to campaign for his own party during the Assin-North Byelection, precipitated by the criminal breach of the dual-nationality or citizenship laws of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana by Mr. James Gyakye Quayson, a longtime Ghanaian-born Canadian citizen, on grounds that the New Patriotic Party’s leadership had thrown its full heft of electoral support behind then Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia in the party’s 2024 Presidential Primary, would now shamelessly have the rest of the party’s membership, supporters and sympathizers believe that he is the one best qualified presidential-candidacy material to lead the New Patriotic Party into the 2028 Presidential Election.
No such pathologically self-serving proposition could be more downright preposterous. First of all, not only has Mr. Ohene Agyapong irredeemably demonstrated that he woefully lacks the requisite leadership talent and skills to unite the still heavily fractured membership composition of the party, the fact of the matter is that the New Patriotic Party would be much more progressive and far better off going about its uphill preparation for the 2028 Presidential-Election Primary by effectively severing all association and links with the narcissistic blowhard and virulently Anti-Islamic and ethnically divisive SOB.
Now, regarding the equally significant and critical question of the raging constitutional crisis gratuitously imposed on the country by President John “Ford Expedition SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, Mr. Ansa Asare is absolutely and unpardonably wrong to fault the admittedly desperate leadership of the New Patriotic Party. The unarguable truth of the matter is that it was the patently and the flagrantly perennial decision by the Mahama 2,0 regime to deliberately and capriciously “bastardize” and eviscerate the credibility and the integrity of Ghana’s Judicial Establishment, by nefariously and illegally subordinating the latter coordinate institutional establishment of our Three-Pronged democratic culture that resulted in the current state of constitutional crisis in the country, one that clearly threatens Ghana’s fiercely fought and hard-won democratic culture itself.
Maybe Mr. Ansa Asare does not recognize the grim and sinister reality on the ground; or maybe the former Director of the Makola-based Ghana School of Law does, indeed. Which is that in recklessly, gratuitously and vindictively attempting to effectively derail the integrity and the credibility of Ghana’s Fourth Republican Democratic Culture, President Mahama has also suicidally set himself up for irreversible political strangulation. A perfectly avoidable situation situation, if he chooses to do the right thing by ensuring that sanity prevails.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
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