Samia Nkrumah: CPP lacks integrity

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 31, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

We will shortly get to her rather outrageous and presumptuous assertion that it was the “ideals” of her infamous dictator father that eviscerated British colonial rule from Ghana. But for now, we are more interested in highlighting what the former Chairperson of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) said in the lead-up to the party’s most recent presidential primary election and shortly thereafter. As we vividly recall, ever since Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah announced her intention of leading the party named after her late father’s old political baby into the 2016 presidential election, she has never ceased touting the rump-Convention People’s Party as the most viable alternative to the country’s two major parties, namely, the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).

Now, having been soundly trounced and sobered out of her vaulting and oversized ambition of clinching her deposed late father’s old job which, by the way, Ghana’s first postcolonial premier and later executive president performed epically badly, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah’s daughter by his Egyptian trophy wife, Samia Yaba, is now implicitly claiming that she has been speaking purely in jest, after all, and that the leaders and delegates of the rump-Convention People’s Party are even more corrupt and bribe-prone than their counterparts of the New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress.

The former rump-CPP Member of Parliament for her late father’s home district, in the Nzema area of the Western Region, has also virulently accused Ivor Greenstreet, the man who commandingly defeated her for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination, as a vote-buying political scam-artist. She did not use these exact words but she unmistakably implied the same. On the whole, Mr. Greenstreet defeated Ms. Nkrumah by clinching a humongous 64-percent of delegate votes. Ms. Nkrumah is staunchly backed in her accusation against Mr. Greenstreet, the former rump-CPP General-Secretary, by Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa, a motor-mouthed street-brawling fixture who has failed in his bid to be elected rump-CPP presidential candidate several times in the past.

Ms. Nkrumah has, however, said that she accepts the outcome of the election results. She is only not satisfied with the fairness and integrity of the same. Interestingly, what Ms. Nkrumah has yet to publicly admit is the incontrovertible fact that she has been riding on the crest of the fame and past, albeit presently jaded, popularity of her legendary father. Indeed, as a Member of Parliament for Jomoro Constituency, Ms. Nkrumah lost her seat the second time around. She has been widely accused of abusing the support and trust of those who misguidedly, in retrospect, offered her their mandate because they had naively perceived her to be her father’s political avatar in his heydays.

The former First-Daughter, who is married to an Italian national, has also accused her one-time staunch ally of having induced congressional delegates with monetary bribes ranging from GHC 200 to GHC 500 in the party’s most recent presidential primary. Mr. Greenstreet has called for party unity going forth; but it is not clear how such call will pan out in the long haul, especially where Ms. Nkrumah and her supporters are concerned. How Mr. Greenstreet, a fire-spitting paraplegic, emerges from Ms. Nkrumah’s damning accusations of bribery and corruption remains to be seen.

One thing, however, is certain as of this writing. And it is the fact that the title of Prof. Ayi Kwei Armah’s literary classic “The Beautyful [sic] Ones Are Not Yet Born” has prophetic relevance for Ghanaian political culture even today.

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