COMMENT: Inside the moated fortresses of ignorance of the Kennedy Agyapongs

By Kofi Thompson

For those who have failed thus far to see through the few powerful and cynical individuals, who currently hold sway in the New Patriotic Party (NPP), and surround the decent and gentlemanly Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo, it might be hard to connect a member of Parliament representing a constituency controlled by their party, in what is supposed to be a democratic country, with a call to the youth of their party to be prepared to go out unto the streets to sacrifice their lives for the NPP.

The shock for such innocents-abroad, is that they always thought their party's view, was that compromise and tolerance underpinned constitutional democracy.

Consequently, they find the verbally aggressive tone of the Kennedy Agyapongs in their midst, rather baffling and hard to fathom.

Above all, those decent individuals always thought that the fight for power in a democracy, for their party, was premised on competition of ideas - with power going to the political party able to convince the largest numbers of voters that its vision of society best represented their own aspirations.

The sad thing in all this, as the Ghanaian nation-state is made more or less steadily impossible to govern, and its fragile economy slowly emasculated - as a political tactic to advance the power-through-the-back-door-route agenda of the party's reckless and short-sighted hardliners: regardless of its deleterious impact on ordinary people - is that the NPP's Kennedy Agyapongs, more than most in their party, know perfectly well that their party did indeed lose the December 2012 presidential election: as the Supreme Court will eventually rule.

They are also aware that because the dominant clique of hardliners in the party's leadership believe firmly that in politics and life, the end always justifies the means, they see the exploitation of legal technicalities as a perfect back-door-route-to-power political tactic - never mind the effect on the nation of their insincere actions.

And it is also a super-effective back-door-route-to-power tactic, which, as luck would have it, can suitably be clothed by the cynical and amoral, with the respectable and classical garb of high-principle and belief in the rule of law - to dazzle the silent majority of decent-minded individuals who identify with their party mostly for the ideals it claims to stand for.

That is why as long as the few extremist and hard-line individuals in Nana Akufo-Addo's inner-circle continue to dominate the NPP and maintain their iron grip on the party's structures, the party's Kennedy Agyapongs will continue to sally forth from their chi-chi moated-fortresses of ignorance, to rave and rant - much to the discomfiture of ordinary apolitical folk in Ghana: and continue to get away with their pure nonsense on bamboo stilts, simply because of the spinelessness of those who should arrest and prosecute those loud blunderbuss-mouths, but fail to do so.

Yet appeasement in such circumstances seldom leads to lasting peace - as has been demonstrated in countless places where civil strife is deliberately engineered by power-hungry and sadistic individuals.

Ghanaians will therefore continue to be forced to put up with the anti-democratic and seditious fulminations of the NPP's Kennedy Agyapongs for some time - meaning those confounded geniuses will continue living comfortably in their moated fortresses of ignorance. Pity. Hmm, Ghana - eyeasem o.

Email: peakofi.thompson@gmail.com.