Factions have always existed within the New Patriotic Party (NPP), and so it is not clear precisely what he means when the suspended Second-Vice Chairman of the NPP, Mr. Sammy Crabbe, flippantly asserts that factionalism is ripping the party apart at the seams, as it were (See “Election 2016: Crabbe Predicts Doom for NPP” TV3Network.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/20/16). Indeed, when I visited London and spoke on the phone to some members of their gang some 6 years ago, Mr. Crabbe was a bona fide operative of the Kyerematen faction. The group even attempted, abortively, to get me to pledge allegiance to them. Even as far back as 1992, when Prof. Albert A. Adu-Boahen, late, was the Presidential Candidate of the NPP, there were factional groupings among the membership of the nation’s largest political party.

The difference today, however, is that whereas the Adu-Boahen faction, presently led by Nana Akufo-Addo, had astute and selfless leaders who were readily willing to subsume their individual ambitions and factional interests under the greater good of the party at large, the Kyerematen faction, originally the Kufuor faction, imperiously fronted by Messrs. Paul Afoko, Kwabena Agyepong and Sammy Crabbe, among a slew of others, would intemperately and intransigently have things their own way or the proverbial highway. And this was essentially the dangerous and divisive game in which they were cavalierly indulging when the divine axe of party discipline and social justice landed on their pates. And so it is rather outrageous for people who have been dead-set against the presidential ambitions and leadership success of Nana Akufo-Addo, to be blaming the latter for the current impasse in the party.
Mr. Crabbe and his gang members are not fooling anybody, least of all, those of us who have been studiously following the affairs of the party for some two decades now. Messrs. Afoko, Agyepong and Crabbe need to be told forcefully and frontally, or upfront, that they cannot eat their kenkey and fried fish with black pepper-sauce and have it too. Needless to say, if the NPP’s Constitution was dysfunctional, as Mr. Crabbe reportedly had occasion to tell a radio talk-show host recently, the three Kyerematen factionalists would still be in control at the party’s Kokomlemle headquarters playing havoc and mischief with the hopes and aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian electorate. It is not, for example, by accident, or sheer happenstance, that all the party’s operatives and staunch supporters and loyalists who have met with violent deaths were backers of Nana Akufo-Addo.

Indeed, if they were really interested in forging a cohesive and a united front for a landslide victory in the November 2016 election, Messrs. Afoko, Agyepong and Crabbe would not have so smugly and disdainfully presumed to ride roughshod over the standing rules and regulations of the party. To be certain, it constitutes the very apex of arrogance for these three men and their sponsors, both within and without the party, to presume the good fortunes of the party to be inextricably predicated upon them being returned to their former posts. Maybe somebody needs to boldly let it on to them that they have a far better chance of founding and running their own party – maybe they may want to seek advice from Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings and Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom – than being afforded a second chance at party headquarters to enable them to thoroughly and effectively scuttle the electoral viability and credibility of the New Patriotic Party.

The original title of this column, by the way, was “Misery Craves Company.” It is quite understandable that a man who has willfully committed political suicide should desperately want to carry along with him into his grave, as many of the very people whom he had deviously hoped to bury, but had woefully failed to do so, by the grace of Divine Providence, with him as possible. But whether it is either doable or even the right thing to do, remains to be seen.

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