By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

His name does not even sound like those of most Ghanaians; and yet, he claims to be more identifiable and attuned to the needs and aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian people.

Maybe the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP), Mr. Ivor Greenstreet, ought to be reminded that when a Catholic-baptized and partly nominally Europeanized Mr. Kwame Nkrumah rediscovered his proud African cultural heritage, the future first postcolonial leader of Ghana discarded his involuntarily given name of “Francis.”

Then, also, Mr. Greenstreet may well have learned or heard about the immortalized revolutionary likes of Lawyer Kobina Sekyi, who discarded his Anglo-European surname and promptly reassumed his proud African nominal identity and heritage.

In the pathetic case of Mr. Greenstreet, though, the man has simply and facilely slapped the common Akan day-name of “Kobina” in-between his Afropean names of “Ivor” and “Greenstreet.” He clearly does not seem to be comfortable with his indigenous African identity, just as Chairman Jerry John Rawlings has been widely alleged to have used his Anglo-Scottish name to hustle his way back into the good graces and confidence of the very patrilineage that had roundly and unreservedly rejected him earlier on. Now, the shamelessly ethnocentric Mr. Greenstreet would have Ghanaian voters believe that, somehow, the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, is an “Accra Northerner”; that somehow, he, Mr. Greenstreet, is native to Ghana’s capital city in ways that cannot be said of the former Deputy-Governor of the country’s central treasury, the Bank of Ghana.

This is what Ghanaians call gratuitous tribalism, for Mr. Greenstreet, an ethnic Fante, is no more indigenous to our nation’s capital than Dr. Bawumia, although an incontrovertible case can be made of the fact that Dr. Bawumia has acquitted himself far more creditably as an “Accra Northerner” than Mr. Greenstreet, the “Accra Afropean Fante” who has largely used his privileged residency in our nation’s capital to hustle and scam our youths with his night clubs and other morally dissolute enterprises.

Indeed, the problem that the rump-Convention People’s Party’s Mr. Greenstreet has in convincing Ghanaians to vote for him is the fact that even his sometime ideological bedmate and most famous of the daughters of President Nkrumah, Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, is convinced that Mr. Greenstreet is a poseur, a pretender and a scam-artist extraordinaire, posing as a genuine and worthy politician. Ms. Nkrumah has also publicly stated that Mr. Greenstreet’s primary electioneering campaign, which culminated with him being nominated as the party’s 2016 presidential candidate, was underwritten by President John Dramani Mahama.

In other words, according to Samia Yaba Nkrumah, Mr. Greenstreet is a paid propagandist for the key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), which clearly explains why the wheelchair-bound Mr. Greenstreet would put up a spirited, albeit morally flawed, argument in favor of President Mahama’s criminal acceptance of the Ford Expedition SUV bribe from Mr. Gibril (Djibril) Kanazoe, the Burkinabe building and road-construction contractor.

Mr. Greenstreet has also virulently accused Dr. Bawumia of expediently constructing boreholes for the people of the so-called Three-Northern-Regions in exchange for their votes. The rump-CPP hustler knows fully well that this is not true, because those of us who have studiously followed the brief political career of the Oxbridge-educated Dr. Bawumia have also seen him construct boreholes for people in the Volta Region and as near to Accra as yours truly’s own ancestral royal township of Nsawam-Adoagyiri.

And so what is this hustling scam-artist talking about? The rump-CPP presidential candidate has also been screaming a lot in the name of Ghana’s communities of the disabled and abjectly deprived. Now, let Mr. Greenstreet, who has promised to supply free wheelchairs to the crippled and poor if voted into power, point us to a single substantive or significant project that he has undertaken for the especial benefit of the country’s poor and destitute, besides endlessly running his loud mouth.

Somebody also needs to tell this shameless Fante Accra-transplant that Gen. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, that brutally slain Asante-Trabuom native and sometime Accra transplant, in just over 6 years, brought more development to the North than even the Nkrumah-led proto-Convention People’s Party (the original and real CPP) did in 15 years! You see, the kind of socialism preached by Mr. Greenstreet and his cohorts relies exclusively on the fruits of the sweat and toil of other people, not their own. And to be certain, political parasites parading in the specious guise of “Social Democrats,” such as Messrs. Mahama and Greenstreet, are the last politicians Ghanaians need to manage our affairs.