Kyerematen's Noble Gesture And NDC's Jitters

In the wake of the December 22-23, 2007 New Patriotic Party’s congress during which former Foreign Minister Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo was elected NPP Presidential Candidate for Election 2008, some prominent members of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) are threatening to initiate legal action against the NPP, on the quite grotesque and gratuitous grounds that, in effect, Mr. Alan Kyerematen’s quite noble decision not to contest a run-off against Nana Akufo-Addo is, somehow, tantamount to a flagrant breach of the Fourth-Republican Constitution of Ghana (Peace-FM 12/28/07).
This is quite interesting, because almost every eligible Ghanaian voter with ideological affiliation to any of the legitimately registered political parties is fully aware of the fact that every political party has its own constitution, which is separate and discrete from the national Constitution. Furthermore must be signally observed the fact that in of themselves, constitutions are not hermetic documents; rather, constitutions are functional and ever-evolving documents which only serve as general guides for political conduct. In other words, the very fact that Mr. Kyerematen’s pre-runoff concession of defeat to Nana Akufo-Addo is unprecedented in the fledgling NPP’s constitutional history simply generates the necessity for the ruling party’s executive membership to seriously consider the future possibility of another pre-runoff concession recurring at another of the NPP’s national delegates’ convention, or congress, and thereby promptly revising, or amending, some of the party’s constitutional provisions accordingly as desired.
Thus, the NDC’s Mr. Mahama Ayariga’s rather quixotic contention that the NPP congress ought to have insisted on either a compulsory runoff between the obvious frontrunner, and now-substantive Presidential Candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, and the latter’s closest contender, Mr. Kyerematen, or in the quite unexpected pre-runoff concession of the latter, declare, by “acclamation,” the nomination of Nana Akufo-Addo as the ruling NPP’s presidential candidate for Election 2008, has no substance in practical reality. For such acclamation is squarely, or fundamentally, procedural, and no convention or established rule immutably necessitated that the NPP congress follow such purely procedural protocol.
In any case, the preceding objection, coming from NDC stalwarts, is quite quaintly intriguing, to say the least; and it would be quite equally interesting for the likes of Mr. Ben Ephson, editor of the Daily Dispatch, and Mr. Mahama Ayariga to enlighten Ghanaian voters as to why even though the 1992 Fourth-Republican Constitution allows for only two presidential terms, the NDC party executives could allow Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings to single-handedly thrice determine that Professor John Evans Atta-Mills ought to, perforce, run as the virtually unopposed presidential candidate of Ghana’s largest parliamentary opposition party. In sum, if the dispassionate critic may aptly ask: Whatever happened to the age-old maxim of the necessity for charity to begin at home?
You see, the problem with politicians like Mr. Mahama Ayariga is that during the course of its protracted and wanton 20-year tenure, members of the P/NDC became so used to summarily dictating to Ghanaians that even in cringing defeat and likely perpetual opposition, members of the P/NDC continue to delude themselves with being entitled, by Manifest Destiny, or divine election, to dictate the terms of how their political opponents ought to conduct themselves and their affairs.
Needless to say, it does not seem to have occurred to the likes of Messrs. Ephson and Ayariga that the quite politically savvy Mr. Kyerematen must have well-calculated his chances of clinching the NPP’s flagbearership prior to registering his pre-runoff concession with the executive membership and the delegates of the party. Evidently on the lookout for an implosion within the NPP, the election-shy NDC membership have decided to strip themselves naked and embark on a wild goose chase.
The real objective of the P/NDC, though, lies with the latter’s evidently crushing disappointment with the election of, perhaps, the most formidable presidential candidate of any party going into Election 2008. they had, as had been widely speculated prior to NPP’s December 22-23, 2007 Convention, that, somehow, the delegates of the ruling NPP were going to blunder by presenting the unicorn-minded NDC with a yuletide windfall, in the form of a relatively inexperienced presidential candidate for Professor Atta-Mills, their importunately perennial presidential nominee, to make clam chowder out of. Thus Messrs. Kwaku Tawia Ampah and Eric Ametor Quarmyne’s fuss-kicking may squarely be seen as a patently ineffectual protest against certain failure for the P/NDC, once again, come Election 2008.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “When Dancers Play Historians and Thinkers,” a forthcoming essay collection on postcolonial Ghanaian politics. E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.

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