By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 29, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
This comes well after the auspicious fact of the indefinite suspension of Messrs. Afoko, Agyepong and Crabbe, and so I really do not expect the observations contained herein to make much of a difference, in terms of the party’s decision-making process. Still, suffice it to say that the petition brought against Mr. Freddie Blay, the Acting National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), is nothing short of the patently frivolous (See “NPP Group Calls for Freddie Blay’s Suspension” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/10/15).
It is frivolous because it is clearly more of a retaliatory ploy than any progressive move aimed at readying up the country’s main opposition political machinery for the democratic takeover and massive reconstruction of the country’s effectively collapsed infrastructure and industrial and entrepreneurial foundations. For instance, the lead signatory to the petition, Mr. Richmond Yeboah, of Adansi-Asokwa, claims that Mr. Blay, as Chief Executive Officer of Western Publications Limited, publishers of the country’s foremost opposition-leaning newspaper, the Daily Guide, has consistently used the latter media organization to singularly undermine the party’s recently suspended National Chairman, Mr. Paul Afoko, and the New Patriotic Party’s General-Secretary, Mr. Kwabena Agyepong.
The fact of the matter here is that when it comes to the promotion of the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and the latter’s running-mate, Alhaji-Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the loyalties of the former rump-Convention People’s Party (CPP) key operative cannot be questioned. Indeed, Mr. Blay’s Daily Guide newspaper plays essentially the same frontline role that the Akufo-Addo-owned, and on the latter score I stand to be corrected, landmark New Statesman newspaper played in the promotion of the leadership cause of then-Candidate John Agyekum-Kufuor and the latter’s running-mate, Alhaji Aliu Mahama, late, and continued to play throughout the 8-year tenure of President John Agyekum-Kufuor. You simply cannot say the same for Messrs. Afoko, Agyepong and Crabbe, all of whose political loyalties were widely known to be unmistakably and intransigently anti-Akufo-Addo.
It is also rather absurd for Mr. Yeboah, the lead signatory to the aforementioned petition against Mr. Blay to claim that deleterious and factional tensions within the New Patriotic Party have only become convulsive during the past year, or in the wake of the ill-fated Tamale congressional election of the “Three Musketeers.” To be certain, factional tensions within the New Patriotic Party far predate the official inauguration of the latter in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, and was even more convulsively so from the nomination of Prof. Albert Adu Amankwaa Boahen, deceased, as the NPP’s very first Presidential Candidate in 1992. It may well have reached its apogee in 2008 when, with barely four months to go to that year’s December general election, Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen publicly and pontifically walked away from the New Patriotic Party.
Mr. Kyerematen is widely known to be the pet presidential candidate of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor. But, perhaps, what is even more significant to note here is the fact that Mr. Kyerematen had mischievously led party leadership and staunch supporters and sympathizers into believing that whatever differences he claimed to have with Nana Akufo-Addo could be promptly and amicably ironed out in time for a resounding victory in 2008. What happened, ultimately, is prime grist for future historians.
Mr. Yeboah, the lead anti-Blay petitioner, and his associates clearly do not have the collective interest and cause of the New Patriotic Party at heart. They are only on the lookout for the kind of internecine acts of vengeance, incrimination and recrimination that have rendered the NPP the kind of rancorous opposition party it is today. Maybe Mr. Yeboah and his co-petitioner, Mr. Sampson Nimako-Darko, may do well to explain precisely what progressive activities the “Three Musketeers” were engaged in that caused the party’s parliamentarians, including Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the Parliamentary Minority Leader, to summarily and effectively cut off their regular contributions to the party’s Asylum Down headquarters.
For instance, Mr. John Boadu, the party’s former National Organizer, presently its Acting General-Secretary, has alleged that whatever decisions that were confidentially taken at party headquarters, especially in regard to strategic policies, shortly found their way onto the airwaves and the pages of National Democratic Congress-leaning and -sponsored newspapers. At no time has Mr. Boadu accused Mr. Blay of using his Daily Guide newspaper to deviously and blisteringly undermine party leadership the way that Messrs. Afoko, Agyepong and Crabbe have publicly attempted to impugn the credibility of the NPP’s National Council (NC), the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) and its Disciplinary Committee (DC).
What have Messrs. Richmond Yeboah and Nimako-Darko got to say in response to the preceding undeniably disturbing observations?
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