By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 27, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I read Paapa Kwamensa's article captioned "Why I Will Vote Alan" (MyJoyOnline.com 8/27/14) and do not envy the writer one bit. Actually, I thought the writer had needlessly embarrassed himself. Indeed, this was the one moment in which the writer could have wisely maintained whatever integrity he may have had by sticking to the golden rule of silence. His reason for voting for Mr. Alan Cash, formally known as Mr. Alan John Kwadwo "Quitman" Kyerematen, is scandalously bereft of conviction.

First of all, Paapa Kwamensa lists what he claims to be the exceptional qualities and credentials of his man, and then he wistfully wonders why the much-touted genius Kufuor Minister of Trade and Industry and Presidential Special Initiatives is having such a hard time marketing himself to the delegates that he so cavalierly abandoned some six years ago.

Maybe some frank and levelheaded observer like yours truly ought to apprise this Kyerematen shill that the answer to his question is clearly built into the same. Which is simply to say that Alan Cash just about lost every shred of credibility that he well may have had about the time that he so selfishly and recklessly abandoned the party claiming, characteristically contemptuously, that the aims, objectives and aspirations of the core membership of the New Patriotic Party were too parochial for his liking.

Now, predictably, Mr. Cash is struggling desperately to put a badly tainted past that just wouldn't readily fade away behind him. In short, Alan's emotionally immature past has come back to haunt him like his own shadow. Well, a purportedly astute and reputable Trade Minister who has such an epic, near-Sissyphean, difficulty marketing himself as the ideal presidential candidate for Election 2016, is highly unlikely to creditably acquit himself as a dynamic and progressive president, or is he?

At any rate, listing the leaden litany of Mr. Kyerematen's personal achievements actually made Paapa Kwamensa's choice of a New Patriotic Party presidential candidate all the more difficult to sell. What Mr. Kyerematen's propagandists, in their zealous bid to placing their choice race horse above the pack, and the competition, seem to have completely lost sight of is the fact that the list of their subject's engagement in far too many business enterprises within a relatively short span of time, actually makes Mr. Cash look like a Jack-of-all-Trades and a Master of...well, you know what I am talking about, dear reader, or don't you?

His corner men also claim that Mr. Kyerematen has a degree of crossover appeal that the man who twice froze his vaulting presidential ambitions in their tracks can barely fathom. If this assertion has validity, then why are the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress not reaching across the gaping ideological chasm between Ghana's two major political parties to snap him up? After all, Alan Cash has been frantically and officiously advising his WTO promoters among the top-echelons of the NDC to "Go Back to President Kufuor's Industrial Development Plan," almost as if Mr. Kyerematen were one of the "crackerjack" Mahama economic advisers at the Flagstaff House.

Or is it just one subtle aspect of his much-maligned Agenda 2020 strategy? Or his foolhardy and adamant refusal to recognize and accept the fact that the NDC and NPP are poles apart in their individual approaches to national development? And also, just why has Alan Cash woefully failed to parade a vintage electioneering campaign sampling of the pan-African beneficiaries of his purported continent-wide entrepreneurial success stories? Paapa Kwamensa nearly succeeded in fooling me. Fat chance, buddy!

There is, of course, no gainsaying the fact that Alan has an impressive physical presence; but who wants to pop a can of coca-cola, or even a jug of Bubra, with such an imperious pachyderm/elephant of a man? Rather, wouldn't quite a decent-sounding man like Paapa Kwamensa crave a heady calabash of palmwine with a man of his own physical size? Go figure!

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