By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 14, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
I hadn’t quite noticed that then-Candidate John Agyekum-Kufuor, of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), in 1996 selected the Rawlings discarded Mr. Kow Nkensen-Arkaah, late, as his running-mate. This was shortly after then-President Jerry John Rawlings had physically beaten up the Harvard-educated MBA-degree holder with whom the country’s longest-reigning military dictator had handily won the 1992 general election, the first of the country’s Fourth-Republican dispensation. Politics, it has been said, makes strange bedfellows. And here, of course, ought to be promptly recalled the fact that exactly a decade earlier, Mr. Kufuor had served in Chairman Rawlings’ cabinet as the latter’s Secretary for Local Government.
Still, it boggles my imagination that the now-former President Kufuor would have stooped so low as to cavalierly and facilely presume to take on the political throw-up or vomit of the infamous Trokosi nationalist hero (See “NPP Cannot Be Trusted in Political Coalition – Ephson” Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/5/15). Candidate Kufuor would end up being soundly trounced by his former Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) boss. Mr. Ben Ephson, editor-publisher of the Daily Dispatch, thinks that the NPP-CPP Alliance was betrayed by the Danquah-Busia-Dombo camp. But the fact of the matter is that such a grossly misplaced and incongruous alliance was bound to unravel from the get go. Ideologically speaking, any ardent or genuine liberal-democrat, such as irrepressibly represented by Messrs. Danquah, Busia and Dombo, would have long beforehand envisaged the proverbial handwriting on the wall and would have promptly nipped such grossly incompatible alliance in the bud. In the end, and quite refreshingly, a much wiser and more cognitively studious Candidate Kufuor would drop the man who ought not to have been either selected or named his running-mate, to begin with.
Mr. Nkensen-Arkaah had previously demonstrated that he was more of a brazen and an impudent opportunist than a serious politician, having recently merged his so-called People’s Convention Party (PCP), an obviously backward reading of the old Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), with the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP). It well appears that it was in nostalgic recall of the NPP-(r-)CPP alliance of 1996 that prompted a newly elected President John Agyekum-Kufuor to coopt then-r-CPP stalwart Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom into his cabinet. Now, a politically desperate Dr. Nduom, founder-proprietor of the so-called Progressive People’s Party (PPP) is in search of a merger with a more formidable political party with which to forge a common cause in his fervid bid to getting the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) out of office.
Needless to say, if I were Nana Akufo-Addo, I would not fathom the possibility of any alliance with the Progressive People’s Party. The latter, as we all know, is a breakaway faction of the rump-Convention People’s Party. But what is even more significant to note is the fact that the leaders of both the r-CPP and the PPP have this quixotic sense of political entitlement, springing from the days of the Nkrumaist dictatorship. Having been deservedly shunted onto the gray and extraneous margins of Ghanaian political opposition, these utterly misguided latter-day Nkrumacrats are in desperate search of any means, by hook or crook, to make themselves relevant as well as re-impose their long-rejected extortionate brand of faux-socialist political culture, once more, on the descendants of their former victims. Fat chance! Of course, this nightmarish political agenda could become an actuality, in to-to, if the current internecine squabbling within the New Patriotic Party is not promptly halted.
For Akufo-Addo, the mischievous decision by Dr. Nduom to officially sit out of the 2008 presidential election runoff between the NPP flagbearer and then-Candidate John Evans Atta-Mills, late, in an obvious affirmation of “Fante Tribal Alliance of Natives,” ought to present enough cognitive grist for mastication. In sum, my thesis here is that the blatant decision by Dr. Nduom to heartily dance to the “Brakatue” and “Fetu” and “Aboakyir” rhythms of “Yeresesamu” with Candidate Mills, even as Edina-Yorke rapturously thumbed his nose at the “Kyebi Ahabanmu” native, ought to serve as a serious warning to Akufo-Addo not to even think of using the proverbial 40-foot pole to tangentially fathom the remote possibility of a tactical temporary alliance with the Progressive People’s Party. The PPP, it is more than quite obvious, is a veritable clone of the NDC. And Akufo-Addo would live to eternally rue making the politically pyrrhic decision of playing “A Kufuor” with Dr. Nduom’s political play-toy.
