Is Greenstreet a Danquaist in an Nkrumaist Cloak?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 6, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

His stentorian and vindictive rhetoric and all, Mr. Ivor Kobina Greenstreet, the newly elected 2016 Presidential Candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP), is rapidly beginning to sound like the proverbial broken record. Actually, he is beginning to sound more like a political upstart desperate for power by hook or crook. The problem that he has here is that Ghanaians are far more interested in a forward-looking leader with a demonstrable development agenda than one pathologically fixated on a pile-up of empty promises. And so far, the avowed dyed-in-the-wool Nkrumaist has been talking with a forked tongue. And it is predictably becoming clear that the 45-year-old lawyer-cum-entrepreneur might be primarily in for himself and his cronies. This is typical CPP leadership style.

He is either a bona fide Nkrumaist or a shameless opportunist pretending to be what he is not. For starters, Mr. Greenstreet claims that if given the mandate in November, he intends to look into the possibility of facilitating the development and commercial use of renewable energy resources. Now that is commonsensical and wisely modernistic. Our elders have a saying that when the time changes, one needs to logically change course with the times. But when he talks about encouraging the private sector to actively participate in the development of energy resources in the country, you know darn well that he must be jiving. Those who have been sedulously following Mr. Greenstreet and Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah are fully aware of the fact that like the socialist patriarch of the proto-Convention People’s Party, these politicians are dead-set against private-sector dabbling in the country’s energy sector. And so it is quite refreshing that Mr. Greenstreet has decided to borrow a page from the development playbook of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Traditionalists.

He has been on the protest lines with those who have vehemently protested against the decision and/or call for the privatization of the nation’s main energy supplier, the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG). And so it would be quite interesting to hear Mr. Greenstreet venture beyond sheer rhetoric and elaborate on precisely how he intends to parcel out a share of energy-sector development to private entrepreneurs and the projected long-term impact of the same. Mr. Greenstreet, it must be laudably acknowledged, is no pansy or dupe. He recognizes the need to forging a pragmatic policy agenda, if he is to make a remarkable difference on the national political front. Recently, for example, he soberly observed that while, indeed, many Ghanaians were fervidly looking towards the emergence of a viable third political party, nevertheless, under the present circumstances, it would not be totally out of kilter for the rump-CPP to look towards entering into a collaborative alliance with either of the two major parties, namely, the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party, with the long-term view of prepping itself for the eventual assumption of the reins of national governance.

This progressive attitude, of course, virulently conflicts with the stance taken by rump-CPP National Chairman Prof. Edmund Delle. At the party’s most recent delegates’ congress, Prof. Delle reportedly bucked protocol by flatly and adamantly rejecting a call by the Greater-Accra Chairman of the New Patriotic Party for the possibility of forging an alliance with the country’s largest political party in the lead-up to Election 2016. In a quite significant sense, one cannot but resonantly agree with Prof. Delle, because ideologically speaking the rump-CPP has far more in common with the Nkrumaist-packed National Democratic Congress than it does with the neo-liberal democratic New Patriotic Party. Rather than unproductively flirting with the Nkrumaist camp, which only envisages an alliance with the NPP primarily in terms of how it can ride roughshod over the back of the latter on its Herculean journey into the Flagstaff House. The NPP leaders may hate the guts of their NDC counterparts, but the rump-CPP leaders are fundamentally the clones of the Mahama posse.

We have seen the rump-CPP, then headed by Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, royally betray the Akufo-Addo-led NPP in the heat of the 2008 presidential election runoff. Rather, what the Akufo-Addo Group needs to do now is to strengthen its communications and propaganda apparatuses and vigorously promote its policy agenda in to-to. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing remiss with political alliances. The problem with the political terrain of Ghana’s Fourth Republic presently is that unlike the faux-socialist and revolutionary National Democratic Congress, the New Patriotic Party has no reliable ideological bedmates among the two dozen or so minor political parties.

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