Konongo Fordjour - 18 July 2009

* NPP Youth, Take Control Of Your Own Destiny!

* Youth, Stand Up And Decide Your Own Fate!

* Power To The Masses!

* It Is Your Turn To Rule!

Our party is getting ready to make changes in its constitution very soon that will bind us for the next six years, the period, the party proposes to come back again to make further changes, if necessary. One most proposed change that calls for this write-up is the clause on presidential candidates. The party’s most powerful, influential, and mainly all men inner-mafia-club wants only TWO MEN to contest for the flag-bearer position. Technically, this will be only the MEN preferred by the club.

We also know that, currently, our party has two major camps. Now, the question is: will the two-man flag-bearer contest proposal involve the preferred leaders of these camps? There is also fundamental acceptance within these camps that, the runners up will automatically become the presidential running mate of the winner of the two-man contest in the national elections. Hence, the game is a done deal; the match is already fixed; and the future of our party is already doomed in advance. Reckless, inconsiderate, and selfish old folks are bent on destroying our party. NPP, a product of the UP, does not belong to any preferred TWO MEN.

I have politely been campaigning for quite a long time, all the way from London-England, with an appeal to our senior citizens to give way to the youth. But it looks like, it is time to push them away, forcefully, and demand our chance to rule. In 1998, we seriously needed that rare unity to win elections. The fundamental understanding at the time was that, the experienced and known elderly men in the system, must be given chance. Once power was taken through the youth support, some old folks started flexing their muscles to show how terribly they can destroy our party. Shame!

Today, people are not strategizing on how possibly the party can create an everlasting leadership trend in our Ghanaian socio-political direction. They have been wasting their energies on how they can selfishly enrich their pockets. It is very sad to watch things unfold helplessly. The Youth must make a change! There is a wind of change blowing across the globe. It is the change that brought the young 43-year-old President J F Kennedy to power; it is the same change that repeated history with the 46-year-old President Bill Clinton to power; and again, the 47-year-old President Barack Hussein Obama to power. In Ghana, a young president is a taboo that Antoa-Nyamaa must destroy. Shame!

The story about the latter leader mentioned above is quite interesting, though! President Obama was written off initially by some small-pocketed superimposed political protagonists. But Cell-Phones, You-Tubes, Twitters, My-Space, etc. which are the youth zones of technological gadgets, turned a written-off worst case scenario into a universally admired leadership we are seeing today. Had Obama accepted that God forbidden fate, the black youth would have remained in our miserable fate.

Our time is now or never. Every eligible voter must vote [Obiara Nto Bi]. Alternatively, the youth must dismiss the old and form a strong party to challenge the two parties, NPP and NDC. A similar case has happened in Japan. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party under Prime Minister Taro Aso, is losing grounds terribly bad to the all new opposition Democratic Party of Japan with young leaders in their late thirties to late forties. With the help of President Obama’s visit, we are well informed that the youth form the largest number of our national population now (a piece of information, which was deliberately made unknown to the public). Realistically speaking, the youth have no reason to remain dependent on the old. Collectively, the youth are richer than the old; education-wise, we are larger, counting per head, than the old; and better organized than the old.

An all out young political party with ambitions of selecting ANY GHANAIAN in late-thirties to late-forties as a presidential candidate, call it: CONSERVATIVE NATIONALIST PARTY, will win elections hands down. This is because, we have the will power, the strength, ability, connections, and most importantly, not smeared in long standing bitter, vicious, tribal-based, and senseless hatred that have tainted their current political leanings. A Youth-inspired political party with no tribal sentiments is a better option for Ghana. There is even an interesting statistics to look at. The current population of Ghana, officially, stands at about 23-million. Make provision for the infirmary, retardation, very young and very old in their upper and lower quartiles as the incapables, who cannot take part in voting, as defined in the national constitution.

Together with the Ghanaian resident abroad, who are eligible to vote under the current stipulations of the constitution but have been denied to vote, a whooping 18-million Ghanaians are readily available to cast their votes. The most interesting thing starts from here. Of the 18-million eligible Ghanaian voters, 14-million Ghanaians make up the YOUTH group. My definition for Youth ranges from the 18-year-olds to 49-year-olds; and the very old group also ranges from the 65-year-olds to infinity. The UN branch on population and families reports that the average lifespan of the Ghanaian today hovers around 55-years for males; and unbelievably, 53-years for females. Therefore the remaining 4-million of the anticipated very old voters will be dominated by the unassigned 50 to 64-year-olds in this write-up.

Furthermore, the 2008 elections brings us extra outlook. Mathematical computations on the partisan voting shows that the NDC leads with a miserable 29% with a little below 28% for NPP. A modest value of about 3% can be assigned to the remaining parties and independent candidates combined. It is therefore beautiful to see that a huge 40% Ghanaians voted on ABSOLUTELY NO party affiliations. This huge number voted purely on attributes. Overall, the Ghanaian voter is politically well-informed and extremely aware of global developments.

And most importantly, the unaffiliated Ghanaian voters are young between 25 and 35 age bracket. A number of factors may be holding them back from committing their loyalty to the existing parties. Corruption in all political parties; lack of trust-worthiness in the execution of duties; wrong choices of policy priorities for implementation; graft; greed; nepotism; etc. are some of the potential factors that discourage the young Ghanaian voters to commit themselves to any party in Ghana today. The Electoral Commissioner informed us that a little above 12-million eligible Ghanaians registered to vote in the 2008 elections leaving nearly 6-million unregistered voters. It is therefore not hard to find why the larger youth group did not want to waste the time in the voting exercises. The youth must rise up now to cease the opportunity that had been available to them for so long. Of course, it is your turn now!

The NPP must be very, very careful with the path the party proposes to tread along. My party from birth must behave and learn to respect diverse opinions. We have come to the end of the road; and we need to decide now. The old people must step aside and give way to the youth in the party. Selfishness, graft, first-family greed, and the feeling that the Ghanaian youth are dummy and should accept any crap from the old, in this modern twenty-first century, must seriously think again. Why should the old think that they are the best people to govern, even in their miserably disposed tribal sentiments? Cast your eyes in every government gatherings, from President Nkrumah to President Mills time. One can see one simple thing, the old school boys. President Obama visit to Ghana was even a lot worse. The supposed pro-youth NDC surprised everyone with a lined up of its best scholarly grey-haired No-hoppers.

Ghana must change with time. Aduru-me-so (It-is-my-turn) and all the cacophonic crap must cease immediately, because they are not words for nation-building. There are so many ways of helping your country to develop - through singing, debates, community developments, philanthropy, etc. - and of course help human capital to improve. Presidents are charismatic leaders, who can cause the hidden skills in citizens to be brought out to develop a nation through delegation. A leader therefore is the one, who is able to ask his or her opponents to relinquish their leadership ambitions for his or her own sake to lead. It is DEFINITELY NOT me-ne-no-ayaaka, aduru-me-so, ma-te-na-mu-akye type of presidents. Shame!

NPP should be extremely careful. It looks like we have hard-to-listen men on top to decide the destiny of the whole lot. In my article titled: Incumbency Theorem, Administering a Wrong Dose for Unsettled Democracy, I warned our party of a possible loss of elections, but people did not pay attention. I warned that the only way the NPP could lose the 2008 presidential election was if our members decide not to vote; and perhaps if the presidential candidate decides to boycott the elections. I posed a question if there were any tangible reasons at the time that would infuriate the NPP presidential candidate to boycott the elections, similar to the 1992 case?

Some of the comments under the article ruled my question out and declared it senseless. Then came the elections day; frustrations set in, and the second presidential run off became necessary. Did the NPP presidential candidate boycott the Tain Constituency election? How about the alienated members, who refused to vote? Did our leaders do their honourable duties? Can we still say that Konongo Fordjour questions are senseless? Seemingly, our great NPP leadership is suffering from egoism with infantile petulant idiosyncrasy. If things do not go our way, then we feel foul play; the 1992 and 2008 electoral boycotts show how insecure we are.

Now once again, let me prophesy time and time again that if we need to leave any serious legacy for generations to come, then we must wise up and open NPP widely enough to anybody who can help maintain that legacy. If we fail to do this, the party will be broken into pieces and eventually destroyed, plain and simple. Here is my strategy. I have said it so many times, and I will say it here again, that: Please let us allow any member of good standing to contest.

We need to create five blocks of our party’s power brokers and assign points to them. For instance, Block A can be called the Ollenu Caucus, Block B can be Dombo Caucus, Block C the Danquah Caucus, Block D the Kaleo Caucus, and Block E the Busia or Kufuor Caucus. The regions can be divided any how we want. For instance, Ashanti Region can be paired with Volta Region and called the Kaleo Caucus (Block D); Central and Upper East Regions can form the Danquah Caucus (Block C); Greater Accra and Northern Regions can make the Busia or Kufuor Caucus (Block E); Brong-Ahafo and Western Regions can form the Dombo Caucus (Block B); and Eastern and Upper West Regions can form the Ollenu Caucus (Block A). The weights of the blocks will be determined by the number of constituencies in them.

For instance there are 39 constituencies in Ashanti Region and 22 in Volta Region; and together the Kaleo Caucus will have 61 points for candidates to grab. The votes collected by a candidate will be weighted against the 61 points. If a candidate is unable to obtain a certain number of percentage points in the first three rounds in the block voting in the standards set by our party, then the candidate automatically drops out of the race. Alternatively, we may analyze our votes on 22,000 points based on the polling stations as well.

The polling voting series grills the presidential candidates in the first round to scale down to the required number of competitors, while the Block Caucus method offers the final round. The polling voting system will decide the final results for the parliamentary candidates while it will act as the initial stages of the presidential contest in the primaries. Political debates centering on practical implementation of prudent policies should be the sole measurements of candidate points. We should set fair but very tough standards that will have no blemishes and stand out in our Ghanaian political arena; a pride the opposition parties will be jealous of.

That is our only way that we can save our party from total collapse. We had tangible reasons to unite during our thirty years in opposition. A lot of grassroots-abuse by our own trusted party leaders have been meted out to faithful party members during the time our own party was in power. Hence, the trust is never there anymore. The only way forward now is to live strictly on conditions that this time, the youth must move ahead with strategic governance.

I hereby call upon all like-minded parliamentarians, TESCON, and the NPP youth living anywhere on the globe, to stand up and be counted to save our party. Please let us all use our little strengths to exert pressure on our senior citizens to follow civilized rules. Every eligible member must contest for any position in the party and every eligible member must also vote. It is criminal to impose TWO MEN on our party. It is also illegal to prevent anybody from contesting for any position in our party. We should continue to pursue democratic rules in our party.

And finally, who are those going to vote on 15 August 2009 to decide the TWO presidential candidates? Is it the same 2,300 cohorts in the 2007 Legon NPP Presidential Candidate Congress, which was accused of dishing out $1,000 cash for votes? Please the youth wing of the party should not be blamed for whatever happens after the exhibition of this sheer stubbornness in our senior party members in their bent down determination to contest for only TWO preferred candidates. NPP, you are warned!

Konongo Fordjour, Boston-USA

E-Mail: koafordjour@yahoo.com