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Opinions of Sunday, 14 October 2007

Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame

Obed Asamoah Writes NDC's Obituary

At a recent campaign rally in the Awutu-Efutu-Senya District of the Central Region, the former chairman of Ghana’s main opposition party, the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), appeared to write the obituary of the Rawlings-led political machine by predicting that the twenty extortionate and protracted years of NDC rule were unlikely to ever repeat themselves in postcolonial Ghanaian history.
Dr. Obed Yao Asamoah ought to know what he is talking about, because his prominence on Ghana’s political landscape has been almost exclusively determined by his role as a major player in the National Democratic Congress’ “politics of impunity,” as the former University of Ghana law lecturer recently had the temerity to tell an audience of his party’s potential supporters and sympathizers in the critical campaign theater of the Central Region.
The preceding notwithstanding, Dr. Asamoah’s prediction rings rather hollow, being that until the founder of the so-called Democratic Freedom Party (DFP) parted ways with the NDC, a little over a year or so ago, Dr. Asamoah could hardly be said to be ideologically distinguishable from the rest of the NDC’s covey of pseudo-Socialist ideologues. And this largely explains why his Democratic Freedom Party has yet to emerge from under the Stygian shadow of the swashbuckling National Democratic Congress.
To be certain, the DFP’s decision to maintain the ironic adjective of “Democratic” in its name, eerily reminds one of the nebulous split of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) from the Danquah-led and seminal United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC). In either case, the motive of divorce was sheer political expediency parading as progressive populism, were there ever any such ideological phenomenon as the latter.
And so it is rather amusing to hear the former Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) Foreign Minister make the following observation: “Supporters of [the] Democratic Freedom Party should not be afraid that we are getting late into the race for power [sic]. We are not. Those of you who were members of the NDC must forever remember that the split in that party arose principally over differences opinion[,] with regards [sic] to the chances of the party [in perpetually maintaining its stranglehold on the Ghanaian electorate] given a particular leadership” (Ghanaweb.com 9/18/07).
It is interesting to deliberately observe herein exactly what Dr. Obed Asamoah has flagrantly and flagitiously failed to tell his audience since his visibly and dramatically ignoble departure from the ranks of the executive membership of the Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC). Those of us avid students of postcolonial Ghanaian politics have not forgotten how the former P/NDC Attorney-General and Minister of Justice came close to being physically trounced by goons – or hired thugs – employed by the NDC capos.
But what is even more significant to observe is the fact that Dr. Asamoah was ignobly pushed out of the P/NDC primarily because he had had the temerity to attempt to literally sideline the man who bullied Ghanaians into constitutionally legitimizing the pseudo-civilian NDC political machine and the latter’s eight-year brutal occupation of the Osu Castle. Thus in terms of ideological suasion – or leaning – the Democratic Freedom Party is a veritable clone of the Provisional National Democratic Congress. Still, it causes absolutely no harm for the DFP and the P/NDC to engage in an internecine wrestling match in Ghana’s political gallery, while the ruling New Patriotic Party sorts things out vis-à-vis the 17 aspiring “Wannabe Kufuors.”
It is in the foregoing regard that the DFP is to be applauded. Short of the preceding, Dr. Asamoah’s “Baby” is almost as good as Mr. Kofi Wayo attempting to launch an Agricultural Revolution by distributing a dozen machetes among unsuspecting victims in the Nkraboa-Coaltar district of the Eastern Region. As for the DFP leader’s myth regarding the NPP having gained remarkable electoral strength by clinching a piddling 14-percent of the votes in the Volta Region during the 2004 general election, perhaps Dr. Asamoah needs to be reminded that during the 1960 Presidential Election, Dr. J. B. Danquah clinched a solid 90-percent, to President Nkrumah’s humiliating 10-percent, of the votes cast in the Volta Region.
In sum, until the P/NDC brazenly and flagrantly normalized the politics of ethnic chauvinism, or tribalism, the Volta Region had traditionally stood behind the United Party (UP) and, before the latter, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC).
The DFP leader’s gripe regarding a culture of rank indiscipline having infested the P/NDC also rings pathetically hollow, for such interpretation appears, curiously, to be almost wholly in reference to the individual personality of the former NDC chairman. “It is politics of impunity to organize vicious attacks in the media intended to denigrate the chairman of your own political party in an election year. It is worse to do it [so?] using persons who cannot compare with him in terms of age, education, achievements, experience and political clout. This is [amounts to?] extreme indiscipline, and leaders who can foster that are not fit to rule Ghana. No nation can make progress without discipline” (Ghanaweb.com 9/18/07).
If one may aptly ask: Exactly when did Dr. Obed Asamoah come to realize the rank infection of indiscipline among the rank-and-file membership of the P/NDC? During the post-nude spanking of our mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers? Or in Koforidua, when “Chairman” Rawlings declared unmistakably the fact of the P/NDC having maintained a one-chairman party and government, which the P/NDC was intent on maintaining in perpetuity?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associated Professor of English and Journalism 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 history. E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.

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