At long last, the New Patriotic Party succeeded in going through the motion of electing new National Executives but there is no denying the fact that the likes of Jake, Bamba, Sir John and Karbo, in the coming days and weeks, will have to defend their dented images as serious doubts hang around their credibility. For a fact, the election of questionable characters to lead the NPP is a clear manifestation of a party in crises lacking the men and women to lead the party out of its quagmire.
Jake Otanka Obetsebi Lamptey, the newly elected Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, who does not speak any local dialect, and facing a credibility crisis (he has still not accounted for monies he collected for the Stadium Disaster Fund) is also a man without any academic qualification.
Jake Obetsebi Lamptey himself told the story of his “certificatelessness” when in 2001, he appeared before the Parliamentary Vetting Committee to go through the process before qualifying to be a Minister in the Kufuor Administration. In answering a question as regards his educational background, Jake Otanka Obetsebi Lamptey told a convoluted story of how he and his brother were shipped to London after the 1966 coup and how he could not pay his school fees and so does not have any academic qualification.
Even though it is a matter of fact that academic qualification may not be a sine qua non to being an effective Chairman, it is interesting to note that the NPP, which claims to be full of academics, will have a certificateless person as the party’s National Chairman.
The question is; where are the men in the NPP?
It is also a matter of public record that Jake’s father was one of the key architects of the bomb-throwing agenda of the UP tradition during the days of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
From his hideout in Bawaleshie (close to East Legon), Jake’s father imported and distributed bombs to the likes of I.C Quaye (who was then a young anarchist) and the Tokyo Joe Boys for them to be detonating at CPP rallies all over the country. The infamous Lucas House bombing, which killed and maimed scores of innocent Ghanaians, was one of the handiworks of Jake’s father and his bomb-throwing operatives. Long before Osama Bin Laden and his Alqaeda militants thought of detonating bombs in airplanes, Jake Obetsebi Lamptey’s father was in the business of distributing and detonating bombs to further the course of the anarchist Danquah/Busia tradition and their destructive quest to win political power through whatever means.
Indeed, it is one of Jake’s father’s bombs that was placed in a bouquet (resulting in the death of an innocent school girl) meant for Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
It is also a matter of fact that Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah eventually died as a result of injuries sustained as a result of Jake’s father’s bomb that went off at Kulungugu.
With Jake Obetsebi Lamptey solidly in the Akufo-Addo camp; and with Akufo-Addo making it clear that he is surrounded by militants; and with all the fire outbreaks; and with Nyaho Tamakloe stating that the 2012 election is going to be a “Gorilla War”; it would not be farfetched to assume that Jake may follow in the footsteps of his father and also distribute bombs to the militants for them to detonate all over the country before and during that 2012 election. The NPP has most certainly come out of its congress physically intact but there is no gainsaying the fact that the party is about to be bruised as the new crop of party leaders are persons who have lots of question marks hanging over their persons.
Nana Biakoye
