Cash Matters, But Character Matters More, Alan!

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

Garden City, New York

July 18, 2014

Nobody is saying that Alan John Kwadwo "Quitman" Kyerematen has not remarkably contributed "cash" (pun intended) towards the establishment and sustainability of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). What we are saying is that cash alone, even as Dr. Danquah once told then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah during the 1950s, does not a party run. Rather, it is the creative ideas and genius of humans, opportunely and constructively backed by money, that runs both a party and a nation (See "Akufo-Addo Disowned Me, Says Alan Kyerematen" Today Newspaper / Ghanaweb.com 7/18/14).

I have said time and again, and hereby repeat the same, that Mr. Kyerematen has a very inexcusably low opinion of the members, supporters and sympathizers of the New Patriotic Party. And he clearly demonstrates this by, once again, lying to them and, indeed, the nation at large. Needless to say, anybody who has been closely following the activities of the NPP at least since December 2007, needs absolutely no convincing that it was Mr. Kyerematen, and not Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who first declared war against not only the party's flagbearer for Elections 2008 and 2012, but also the rank-and-file membership of the NPP in April 2008, when the man popularly known as Alan Cash officially resigned, and effectively vacated, his membership of the NPP.

If Mr. Kyerematen can actually convince himself that writing up and appending his signature to his resignation letter, and personally tendering a copy of the same to then-NPP National Chairman Mac Manu at the party's headquarters, does not constitute a definitive disownership of a full-half of the Ghanaian electorate, then, it goes without saying that the man may be in dire need of psychiatric examination.

You see, where I come from in Ghana, there is something called character (suban); this is what runs an efficient political organization in any civilized nation. Alas, I am afraid this is the one salient aspect of human behavior where Mr. Kyerematen may want to seriously engage the paid services of a clinical psychologist. I currently have a niece at Columbia University Graduate School, studying in the same discipline, who could direct Mr. Kyerematen to one crackerjack or two specialists in this critical field of human relations and behavior.

It is also rather sickening for the former Trade and Industry and PSI Minister to think that after walking roughshod over and rudely out on at least one-half of Ghanaian voters - hypothetically barring his so-called Floating Voters - that Nana Akufo-Addo ought to have gone down on all fours to salaam Alan Cash back into the fold of the membership of the very party he so meanspiritedly sought to totally destroy in 2008.

And if he thought that abandoning ship mid-stream in the eye of the proverbial storm would have both caused the total wreckage of the loyal following of his "arch-nemesis" - yes, I said it; and I mean every sound and letter of the same - and the party at large, then Mr. Kyerematen had better take his cash elsewhere.

We know by his own deliberate and pontifical public testimony that Mr. Cash desperately hoped to cause irreparable damage to Nana Akufo-Addo because as part of his widely publicized sneering parting shot, the shamelessly notorious quitter promised to resume his party membership "at the right time." In short, he ought to be living in a fool's paradise, if Mr. Kyerematen even half-thinks that the supporters and sympathizers of his so-called SENIOR BROTHER (well, he is my uncle) are just going to lie supine, fold up and roll over for the Cash Man to ride roughshod over their gonads with his Soweto-styled jackboots.

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