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

In the wake of the re-assumption of the reins of governance by the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), the youths of the party, nicknamed “foot-soldiers,” resorted to the indiscriminate seizure of public buildings. In many instances, these rambunctious youths were even reported to have thrown out government officials and workers in a forcible bid of pressuring the Atta-Mills government to provide them with jobs (See “NPP Property-Grabbing Attitude Causes NDC Youth Agitation – Rashid Pelpuo” MyJoyOnline.com 5/18/10).

In response to such anti-social acts of mayhem, some leading NDC members have chosen the gratuitously facile tack of faulting the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government for having set a bad precedent of inordinate acquisitiveness. Speaking on the Accra-based Metro TV program “Good Morning Ghana,” for instance, deputy parliamentary majority leader and former sports minister Mr. Rahid Pelpuo claimed that such acts of NDC vandalism mirrored the NPP’s ideology of a property-owning democracy.
There are several problems associated with Mr. Pelpuo’s rather warped perspective on these flagrant acts of criminality. First of all, the NDC foot-soldiers’ decision to appropriate violence as a means of achieving their objective has inescapable precedent in the indisputable application of violence by the founding father of the party, as witnessed under the tenures of the so-called Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and now the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Secondly, it is worthwhile highlighting the fact that indiscriminate property seizures and arbitrary redistribution characterized both the AFRC and the PNDC, so it couldn’t be that in resorting to the criminal means of property seizures, both public and private, the NDC foot-soldiers are simply following in the footsteps – pun intended, of course – of the NPP. We have even learned, to our utmost horror, that, in fact, the 1982 brutal assassination of the three Supreme Court judges and the retired Army officer was a dastardly attempt by the Rawlings camp to summarily proscribe the legitimate judicial governance of property acquisition.

What makes the current state of affairs even more troubling is the apparent cynicism and smugness of key NDC operatives like Mr. Pelpuo towards the predatory tendencies of the NDC foot-soldiers. For the latter suggests abject complicity on the part of the NDC power brokers, as it were. This is further complicated by the fact that the government has yet to present the entire country with the estimated cost to the taxpayer of the untold havoc wreaked so far on our national economy by the NDC foot-soldiers. And, also, even more importantly, how the Atta-Mills government intends to make the culprits pay for such viciously deliberate bleeding of the meager fortunes of our polity.

What is also rather pathetic is that until a few weeks ago, the government had no publicly promulgated youth employment policy; and then what is even more interesting, its agenda for the Kufuor-minted National Youth Empowerment Program (NYEP) merely juggles numbers in a bid to scoring cheap political points. This, however, is in keeping with the facile Nkrumaist mantra of seeking first the political kingdom as an open sesame to material bonanza. Consequently, in the casual reckoning of the NDC operatives and their lackeys, political power is more of an end in itself than a constructive means to the legitimate creation of wealth for the common good. In sum, the same callow attitude subtends the Atta-Mills government’s stance towards the country’s recent discovery of the proverbial “black gold” in commercial quantities.
One only needs to critically examine the most recent State of the Nation address by President Atta-Mills to draw a withering conclusion on the shockingly shallow mentality of our Ghanaian philosopher-king. For the former Legon tax-law scholar, Ghana’s new-found oil resources are akin to the heady discovery of a snake-oil panacea. “Inventiveness” is, perhaps, the most hostile word in the vocabulary arsenal of the key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress. Ironically, it is squarely upon the eudemonious spirit of ingenuity that Ghana’s viability as a middle-level economy ought to be predicated.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 21 books, including “The New Scapegoats: Colored-On-Black Racism” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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