An Endorsement Akufo-Addo May Do Well to Consider

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

Following her massive failure to be elected National Democratic Congress’ presidential candidate for Election 2012, the ever-shameless Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings took to the patently nuisance strategy of going around the country staging rallies dubbed as “Thanksgiving Meetings” with the handful of toadies who voted for her. The rallies have largely been a virtual nuisance because they have primarily given her a platform to spew vitriol at the man who gave the former first lady the most demeaning political trouncing of her life as a presumptuous public figure.
Even so, the wife of former President Jerry John Rawlings has not been half-successful in her rather roguish attempt to turn the national spotlight away from the Mills-Mahama administration onto herself. Health-wise, the good thing about the rallies is that they have given her the chance to blow off steam as a means of recovering from the obvious shock and trauma which she must, undoubtedly, have suffered in her unpardonably quixotic attempt at cavalierly unseating the man staunchly, consistently and persistently anointed by her own former strongman husband.
What is rather curious and pathetically indicative of the nervous wreck that the Mills-Mahama camp of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) has become is strikingly reflected by last Saturday’s alleged decision by some macho men recruited by Mr. Elvis Amoase, the Cape Coast constituency chairman of the NDC, to prevent the former first lady from holding one of her thanksgiving rallies at the publicly-owned Cape Coast Town Hall. If, as we have been told, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings’ campaign team had prepaid for the use of the town hall for the rally, then it goes without saying that the former first lady reserves every right to sue the disrupters, not only for a full refund of their fee but also for the very fact of having been deliberately, savagely and callously prevented from democratically expressing herself as a bona fide citizen of Fourth-Republican Ghana.
In the latter context, the former first lady could even sue for punitive damages resulting from the plain humiliation and mental anguish endured. What is worth highlighting here, however, is that this clearly unorthodox action by the Mills-backed macho men strikingly mirrors the kind of lurid territorial game which former President Rawlings attempted to play when in the lead-up to the Sunyani delegates’ congress of the NDC, Sogakope Jeremiah passionately appealed to his Anlo-Ewe constituents against returning President Mills as the party’s candidate for Election 2012. In other words, by his clearly untoward and forensically undemocratic action, the Cape Coast chairman of the National Democratic Congress may well have set himself and President Mills on an electoral collision course against their Volta Regional counterparts. In such event, needless to say, the sole winner could be none other than former President Rawlings.
This unwise attempt to further alienate an already alienated Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings could well heavily redound to the benefit of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), and particularly to the unmistakable benefit of Candidate Akufo-Addo, whose name the former first lady dourly conjured as a warning to her hitherto internal political enemies. Indeed, as I soberly pondered the foregoing, the age-old saying that “Politics makes strange bedfellows” readily surged up my mnemonic faculties. And inasmuch as, ordinarily, I would rather have the former first lady stay at least a hundred miles away from me anytime and any day, I, nevertheless, found myself wondering about the wisdom and/or feasibility of having some smooth-operating Akufo-Addo bona fides reach out to the former first lady for a common-cause pledge of allegiance – which is to unreservedly work in concert to guarantee the salutary and resounding ouster of a bumbling and indescribably corrupt Mills-Mahama regime.

*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
###