By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
June 26, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

When Nana Akufo-Addo embarked on his electioneering campaign tour of the Volta Region, recently, the National Organizer of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) accused the 2016 New Patriotic Party’s presidential candidate of attempting to save face. Mr. Kofi Adams, characteristically, failed to explain precisely what he meant by Ghana’s former Justice Minister’s trying to save face. He had not taken into account the glaring fact that it was the people of the Volta Region, largely the Anlo-Ewes, and their traditional rulers and their NDC political hostage takers who were the ones who were now wising up and joining ranks with their fellow countrymen and women already in the mainstream of our national political culture.

Now the logically erratic Mr. Adams is claiming that the refusal of the NDC to have President John Dramani Mahama participate in the ongoing Institute of Economic Affairs-sponsored 2016 presidential debates is protected by Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution (See “We Exercised Our Right Not to Join IEA Debates – Kofi Adams” Modernghana.com 6/22/16). What is at once interesting and ironic here is the fact that just about the same time as Mr. Adams was smugly, albeit visibly wistfully, defending the NDC’s refusal to participate in the IEA-sponsored debates, his immediate superior and the party’s General-Secretary was virulently and rabidly accusing Dr. Edward Mahama, the People’s National Convention’s presidential candidate, of having betrayed the trust of the key operatives of the ruling party.

And so clearly, what we have here is the fact that the NDC’s headquarters’ Abongo Boys are at cross-purposes. The notorious cross-dressing former deputy cabinet appointee in Chairman Jerry John Rawlings’ government also confessed that the NDC had declined to participate in this year’s IEA-sponsored presidential debates because Mrs. Jean Mensa, the IEA’s Executive Director, and her staff had taken an elitist decision of restricting the main forum of the debates to a tête-a-tête between the presidential candidates of the country’s two major parties, namely, President John Dramani Mahama and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. The unmistakable implication here is that Mr. Asiedu-Nketia had expected a more inclusive program.

The fact of the matter is that the NDC headquarters operatives have absolutely no credible record of inclusiveness to brag about, as I pointed out in one or two of my previous columns. The most striking case in point, of course, was the blatantly unconscionable barring of Mr. George Boateng, the former NDC’s Constituency Youth Organizer for Ofankor, in the Greater-Accra Region, from running against Mr. Mahama in the party’s presidential primary. Mr. Boateng’s membership of the NDC would also be promptly and summarily revoked.

Predictable, Mr. Adams would argue that in 2004 when he was running for reelection, then-sitting President John Agyekum-Kufuor had declined to participate in the IEA-sponsored debates. This is what many an ardent critic of the NDC has aptly characterized as the party leadership’s pathological penchant for copycatting or equalizing with their main New Patriotic Party opponents. The difference here, though, contrary to what Mr. Adams would have his audiences believe, is the fact that going into the 2004 presidential election, unlike Mr. Mahama, Mr. Kufuor had unquestionably established his commanding lead over all his competitors. This is scarcely the case with President Mahama who continues to be incessantly rocked by one scandal after another, and who also continues to flagrantly use the key operatives of the Electoral Commission (EC) to doggedly and shamelessly pursue his unwholesome agenda of rigging the 2016 general election in his favor, thus the EC’s running game of brinkmanship with the Wood Supreme Court over the Ramadan-Nimako Decision of having the names of all voters who registered to vote in the 2012 general election by the now-delegitimized use of their National Health Insurance Cards.

The NDC clearly wants to employ Chinese-style communist tactics in its party headquarters decision not to allow President Mahama to participate in the 2016 presidential debates. Like the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party (CP), with which the NDC operatives have been fervidly flirting in recent months, the aim here has been for the otherwise increasingly marginalized NDC headquarters operatives to reassert the Supremacy of the party vis-à-vis the Mahama government, thus the torrid raining of verbal abuse with which the likes of Mr. Koku Anyidoho, the party’s Deputy General-Secretary, recently accused President Mahama and Foreign Minister Hanna Tetteh of having gone over the heads of party chiefs to covertly work out the terms of this year’s IEA-sponsored debates with Mrs. Jean Mensa.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs