Yes, Boot-For-Boot, Kwasi Kyei!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 12, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

This is the kind of trench-war politics that I have been advocating for nearly a decade now. The kind of politics that is empowering of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) and is bound to help it win the 2016 general election. You see, as long as Ghana continues to pursue a winner-takes-all approach to democracy, the party in power is apt to unduly wield political advantage by misappropriating the taxpayer's money to ensure that it maintains a stranglehold on the reins of governance for as long as sponsors are willing to be pushed around and ridden roughshod over. Now we have a man with real marbles in the New Patriotic Party who has decided to turn the tables and the tide.

Following President Mahama's cheap publicity stunt of distributing some 10,000 pairs of Ghanaian-made shoes and sandals to pupils in selected public schools across the country, the Asante Regional Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party decided to up Mr. Mahama's ante by distributing some 2,000 pairs of American-made genuine-leather sandals to schoolchildren in the Kwanwoma township of the Atwima district. For those of our readers who may not know this, Atwima is the same district from which former President John Agyekum-Kufuor served as a Member of Parliament and Deputy Parliamentary Minority Leader during Ghana's shortlived Third Republic. It is also the same district in which the dastardly slain Chairman Ignatius Kutu Acheampong was born and raised.

Mr. Kwasi Kyei's quite sound argument is that the mere distribution of footware and poor-quality school uniforms to public school pupils is not the most effective way of moving the country into an enviable middle-income level of development. It merely provides instant gratification on a very low and transient level. Rather, Mr. Kyei counsels the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) government to foresightedly and constructively focus its attention on the creation of qualitative jobs to enable parents to live a life of dignity and be able to buy shoes and uniforms for their own children, as part of the normal role of being parents and guardians. Mr. Kyei is also quick to point out that as the sitting president, Mr. Mahama's selectively distributed 10,000 shoes were more of an insult to the intelligence of Ghanaian parents than its being a broad-based and progressive agenda for the country.

The foregoing gesture, according to the Asante Regional NPP Communications Director, was too little and at best discriminatory and one that did not reflect the vision of a leader who had the interest of the entire nation at heart. He also noted that he decided to launch the distribution of his 2,000 pairs of U.S.-made genuine-leather shoes at Atwima-Kwanwoma because that was his hometown. But even more significantly, Mr. Kyei observed that he was being guided by the globally approved maxim of charity beginning at home. He intended to extend his generosity to other parts of the Asante Region and the country at large in due course.

The shoes, Mr. Kyei confidently announced, had been shipped to Ghana by some friends, supporters and sympathizers of the New Patriotic Party resident in the United States. He disclosed that he would shortly be in receipt of another consignment of shoes from his benefactors. Indeed, I have often counseled the leadership of the New Patriotic Party that the days of making empty campaign promises from the grayey margins of the political opposition are well behind the times. In other words, if a party in opposition cannot mobilize enough material resources to demonstrate that given the mandate it can promptly deliver on its agenda and electoral campaign promises, as Mr. Kyei is engaged in presently, then that political party had better strike set or get shoved out of sight and out of mind. The saying that one must put one's money where one's mouth is could not be more true.

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