Can NDC Ever Become a “Democratic” Party? – Part 1

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

Garden City, New York

September 4, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum,net

I have always maintained that the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress (NDC) never transitioned from a dictatorial “revolutionary” juggernaut of a junta into a modern, civilized democratic political organization. As far as I have been able to critically observe, key NDC operatives like Messrs. John Dramani Mahama, Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, Julius Debrah and Ofosu-Ampofo never psychologically crossed over from the savage and wantonly abject culture of the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) eras. They appear to be permanently stuck in the politically primitive Dark Ages of postcolonial Ghana.

This pretty much informs the scandalous decision by the General-Secretary of the ruling “party,” for want of a better word, to summarily dismiss some democratically minded operatives at the NDC headquarters for allegedly issuing presidential candidacy nomination forms to Mr. George Boateng, the party’s Youth Organizer from the Oyarifa Constituency in the Greater-Accra Region (See “NDC Sacks Officials for Issuing Nomination Forms” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/3/15). Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, also popularly known as “General Mosquito,” claims that party rules permit only the General-Secretary and his assigns to issue nomination forms to prospective contestants at all levels of NDC-sponsored primaries, in this instance, in the lead-up to Election 2016. The problem here, though, is that the NDC headquarters staff who were reportedly fired by Mr. Asiedu-Nketia were clearly not fired because they had supposedly breached administrative protocol, but essentially because of the person to whom the nomination forms were issued, Mr. George Boateng.

Mr. Asiedu-Nketia and many of the members of the party’s top hierarchy have been giving thinly-veiled public warnings for some time now that President Mahama was scheduled to be nominated unopposed to contest Election 2016. This is perfectly in character with the impudent robber-barons who run the National Democratic Congress. But whether such dictatorial protocol does not flagrantly violate the country’s 1992 Republican Constitution and election laws ought to be scrutinized by constitutional-law experts and healthily debated in a legitimately constituted court of the land. And on the latter score, of course, I am also thinking about our apex court, so-called, to wit, the Wood-presided Supreme Court of Ghana. This is very interesting because in the wake of the 2007 New Patriotic Party presidential primary in which Nana Akufo-Addo resoundingly defeated Mr. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen but failed to clinch the 50-percentile mark stipulated by party rules – there had been seventeen candidates in the contest, and Akufo-Addo had garnered 47-percent of delegate votes – some key NDC operatives, including Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, virulently insisted that the 2008 New Patriotic Party’s Presidential Candidate had woefully failed the litmus test of democratic leadership approval and/or acceptability.

Indeed, what we need to be discussing here is whether NDC party rules expressly prohibit healthy democratic competition when it comes to the nomination of the party’s presidential candidate, even in the case of an incumbent such as Mr. Mahama. And here, of course, it is worth noting that in 2010, when Chairman Jerry John Rawlings embarrassingly backed his pathologically egocentric wife, Nana Konadu Agyeman, against President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, the latter was the presidential incumbent. But even more significant ought to be underscored the fact that neither Mr. Asiedu-Nketia nor any senior party executive at the NDC headquarters had prevented Mrs. Rawlings from contesting President Mills for the party’s topmost electoral ticket. In other words, there is established precedent unmistakably pointing to the fact that Mr. Asiedu-Nketia’s decision to prevent Mr. Boateng from challenging President Mahama for the party’s flagbearership nomination in the lead-up to Election 2016 is clearly more in the breach than being in consonance with established party protocol.

The NDC must not be allowed, under any circumstances, to establish its own arbitrary and capricious ruled of electoral and/or political engagement. Ghana is a constitutional democracy and not a communist dictatorship, where herd mentality is more the norm than the anomaly.