Did NDC violate the 1992 constitution?

The very caption of this article is oxymoronic, because the very existence of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) violates the very salient tenets of Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution. And so to attempt to fault Nana Osei-Wusu for accepting President Mahama’s appointment to serve as a member of the Atebubu-Amantin District Assembly would simply be grossly tantamount to an abject non-issue (See “I am a Member of the NDC – Atebubu Chief” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/31/16).

Nana Osei-Wusu, to begin with, is not the substantive Chief of Atebubu, as the caption of the article reporting the violent factional clashes between some two NDC youth groups erroneously sough to suggest. He is the Sanaahene (or Treasury Director) to the Chief of Atebubu. In other words, Nana Osei-Wusu is a royal cabinet appointee to the Chief of Atebubu. As of this writing, I had yet to check and find out whether the Chief of Atebubu was a paramount chief or not, primarily because the angle of the story that I was more interested in highlighting regarded how the factional battles between the two Atebubu NDC youth groups strikingly reflected what a paid NDC-agitprop commentator recently described as the “patapaa” spirit of many a key main opposition New Patriotic Party operative.

Actually, it is the key operatives and, to be certain, the entire constabulary of the National Democratic Congress that have been breastfed with and weaned on the schoolyard-bully spirit of “Patapaa.” I am also not the least bit flabbergasted that Nana Osei-Wusu would come public to boldly assert his card-carrying membership of the NDC. This ought to have been known to even the most retarded Atebubu NDC operative, the moment the Sanaahene decided to unconstitutionally accept his District Assembly membership payola from President John Dramani Mahama. As the Chief of the Atebubu Royal Treasury, Nana Osei-Wusu was an obvious choice and the most logical conduit for the Flagstaff House to courting the support of the substantive Atebubuhene.

Nevertheless, Nana Osei-Wusu had a few meaningful words to say in connection with the violent clashes between the two NDC youth groups of Atebubu township. The clashes, we are told, were provoked by rumor claiming that President Mahama had fired Mr. Sampson Oti-Boateng, the Atebubu District Chief Executive (DCE). This, once again, brings into sharp relief the imperative need for all District Chief Executives in the country to be directly selected by the people in the polling booth. Well, in the era of the Internet, you would have thought that President Mahama would have dispatched a bulk-email message to all the relevant political actors of Atebubu to that effect. Predictably, nothing of the sort appears to have been done by the Chief Resident of the Flagstaff House or any of his legion assigns.

Instead, we had the supporters of Mr. Oti-Boateng, the widely rumored to have been fired NDC-DCE, on the one hand, and the supporters of another NDC parliamentarian by the quite voguish and poetic name of Mr. Sanja-Nanja, whose factional supporters are alleged to have attempted to seize Mr. Oti-Boateng’s Flagstaff House-issued vehicle from him. It goes without saying that the NDC operatives have a soft spot for taxpayer-underwritten vehicles which dangerously verges on the pathologically scandalous. And believe it or not, dear reader, this is a quite refreshing change; for it used to be that the NDC toy of choice was the AK-47 semiautomatic rifle, an assault weapon that was popularized by the Rawlings-led juntas of the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). Not very long ago, for instance, the NDC District Chairman of Mim, also in Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia’s Brong-Ahafo part of the country, was nearly hacked to death over the use of an official vehicle.
The NDC leaders are often quick to point to incidents of factional violence among the members of the main opposition New Patriotic Party, as a telling indication that the NPP operatives are not prepared to assume the august reins of governance come January 2017. The fact of the matter, however, is that the NDC operatives are in such a scandalous disarray that Ghanaian democracy and the economy are almost certain to irreparably collapse, should the Mahama Posse be returned to power.

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