Kwabena Nyamekye

Over the weekend, Nana Addo the ex-UNC Deputy General Secretary and now flag bearer of the very tradition he attacked, the NPP, claimed that divisions in the party notwithstanding, he is still going to be President of Ghana come 2017. On reading this, I instantly recalled the history of 3 leaders who suffered similar delusions of grandeur in times of extreme crises.

First there is Adolf Hitler. In March 1945 the Second World War was virtually over. Cornered by the US, UK and the Soviet Union, Hitler’s generals knew that the best thing to do was to throw in the towel and save Germany from further damage with the Soviets actually inside Berlin the capital, pounding at the rag-tag remnants of the once great German armed forces. Hitler however kept insisting that there were two generals of his leading 50,000 soldiers and marching on Berlin to repel the Soviets and thus start the massive counter-attack to turn the tide of the entire War. The fact that these two generals had encountered US and UK forces somewhere in Hamburg 5 weeks previously and had been smashed into a thousand pieces with their soldiers all dead or captured was news Hitler refused to believe. The rest is history.

Another leader was the once supposedly great hero of Romania, President Nicolai Ceausescu who, with his hated wife Elena failed to read the mood on the ground as the Soviet Union’s crises had led to uprisings all across Eastern Europe in the 1990s. He appeared on the balcony of his residence hoping to hear the cheers of the crowd; cheers he was used as to President but all he heard were jeers and hooting. Yet he still insisted that he could hear cheering and that he was still loved by his people. 48 hours later he and his wife had been overthrown and executed.

Final example comes from good old Sadam Hussein, late of Iraq. In the wake of the second US invasion of Iraq, Hussein is toppled and he goes to ground for about 6 months. No one seems to find him until acting on a tip off and good intelligence he is dragged out of a Baghdad rat hole and yet surprise surprise he announces himself to his captors as Sadam Hussein President of Iraq and that he demands a meeting with President Bush of the US. That he had not had a bath for a month and that he had not brushed his teeth for 6 weeks seems to have been lost on him. He was hanged.

With these examples in mind, one must question the Danquah-Busia’s worst flag bearer’s statement on division as not being an issue in 2016 elections. He needs a reality check. In 1979 he played a vital role in ensuring the Danquah-Busia tradition lost the election when he and his acolytes, angry that William Ofori-Atta was not handed the flag bearer position, broke away from us to form the UNC. This was a party with no real ideology. It was really just a hate group, created to attack Victor Owusu, one of the 2 men who mentored our great leader JA Kufuor. Check the facts. It was this division that made sure we lost.

Come 2000 division plays itself out again but this time it is within the NDC. Prof Mills had been foisted on the party and some long-serving members were not happy so they broke away to create the Reform Party and later Obed Asamoah formed the DFP. However, kudos to Mills for working hard to bring the Reform boys back into the fold and this helped him mount a credible and successful challenge against us in 2008. Another sad case of division is the CPP. Fragmented, it stands no chance of winning power simply because no one can identify the CPP in the true sense of the word; there is the CPP, PNC, GCPP etc. If they can’t unite then power will never be theirs

One must thus question Nana Addo for his statement. Is he suggesting that there will be no building of bridges to those who have refused to dance Kpalogo and Kete anytime his name is mentioned just because they are resisting attempts to make the NPP his private property? Will there be no reconciliation whatsoever with those who insist, rightly, that you are to blame for our 2 defeats? If this is the approach then I am even more certain that NPP is going to lose 2016 (already certain) and then 2020 and 2024.
Divided by a man who has an excellent track record of dividing us going back to the last millennium, and who seems to have no intention of acting like a leader and uniting us this time round, the tradition I love so dearly is in serious trouble and yet sadly, the very person responsible for it all seems not to know this.