Controversy Unlimited: In The Name Of ‘MPP’ (I)

Truly I write this for, on behalf of and in the name of My Party People (The MPP), who as the Americans say, are caught between a rock and a very hard place. The MPP is on the verge of undertaking perhaps its most decisive evaluation and reorganization since it was recognized under the laws of Ogyakrom as a bona fide political entity. As part of this evaluation and subsequent reorganization, the floodgates for ideas and opinions are being sought from gurus, sympathizers and ordinary persons to help in the reconsideration of the organizing principles of the great MPP. It is at the confluence of submitted ideas and informal discussions of the ideas contained in the bulky documents submitted to the chief scribe that my problem with the great MPP starts.

Dear reader, I don’t want to be sacked from the MPP, so I will say it as it is without crushing balls! When it suits the leadership of the MPP, they belch out their most popular refrain “don’t wash our dirty linen in public”. When they feel so inclined, they would allow you to wash our dirty linen inside, granted they have already taken their positions on what constitutes ‘dirty linen’ to begin with. It riles me no end. My reason is simple: there are people in the great MPP who think our membership in the party makes us students in a sociology class. True it is that we are being socialized into the ways, thinking and ideological ramifications of our progenitors’ positions on legion issues but for God’s sake, who gave them the right to define us, define what we say and how to say what we want to say? I think democracy, internal or external starts to wither away and die the moment one allows him/herself to become an automaton, mainly because there is such a thing as an “authority” or leader who is perceived to know it all. Herbert Simon disputed that theory in 1978 and earned himself the Nobel Prize. Truth be told, the outcome of the 2008 elections has finally revealed to a great many members of the great MPP that many of our leaders are indeed emptier than the word empty. Perhaps, this is why they do not want us to ‘wash our dirty linen in public’: substitute washing for “exposing”; dirty linen for “leaders” and in public for “bankrupt ideas” and you have a real interpretation of what the whole edict not to wash is really about.

My friend Sam Ellis has always maintained that those we used to (and emphasis is on ‘used to’) idolize for their so-called brilliance or high intelligence quotient enjoyed that adulation mainly because many of us had either not come of age or were caught in the web of hero worshipping, heroes who pride themselves in fighting the persona and ideals of his Jerryship the master MB-339A flyer. Many of their acts of commission and omission have landed us where we are, chiefly because they always maintained that their decrepit old ideas hold true as it did in 1969. Many of them do not recognize that, that era shall never come back and that the politics of contemporary times require new thinking, new ideas and new ways of achieving political power. If anybody of my age group strove to introduce new ideas, that person was bound to be tagged “overambitious”; if you happened to be a known activist or close to the lawyer-politician-flagbearer, then yours was the worst form of apostasy. For sure, they would roast you, the way Kyei the Mensah-Bonsu roasted His Presidential Attahood and his cohorts in their recent press confab. Yet, when you take a glance at Attahood’s rise to the hot seat, he engaged massive new ideas, did not stop the boys from introducing novelty into the body politic (even if that novelty is doomed to be their undoing in the coming years). Had it been the great MPP, they would first of all have kept the boys out of their meetings, the long ones that end up churning out recycled old ideas of no real value vis-à-vis the realities on the ground. So you end up having the guys going to the ground and pretending to work with ideas they do not believe in to begin with, and reporting the kind of information they know those who sit in long meetings love to hear. It ends up massaging non-existent egos and creates the environment for delusions of grandeur and invincibility to blossom. Delusions are definitely a temporary stage; you wake up to the reality when the thumb speaks!

I can almost see the gawks on some people’s faces as they read this piece. Yet when I wrote “In the Name of Danquah” in May of 2008, these same people called and heaped praises on my balding pate for telling the lawyer-politician-flagbearer what they had wanted to tell him all along. For them, criticism is meant for the “other”; I have bad news for them: political parties, if they have forgotten, are entities of collectiveness. That is why some people’s behaviour affects the fortunes of those who sit on the fence and watch without uttering words of reprimand when the situation calls for exactly that. Today we are where we are, yet, some people still think we should keep mum over some things. Another piece of bad news: if you do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result, you really ought to get your faculties evaluated. It is time to do a new thing. True it is, that new ideas are usually and mostly opposed simply and mainly because they are not already common. Those who lack the foresight to see into the future are the ones who rabidly oppose new ideas. This brings me to the vexed issue of “leading member(s)”.

Who is a leading member? This phrase that has also become a title appears to have been a coinage of the press. Yet leaders of the great MPP wear it with great pride, as if without that, their qualifications and standing pale into insignificance. Everybody who squeals on any matter is a ‘leading member’. This has perhaps tempted some people to think that their ideas, thoughts and beliefs are so sacrosanct that they must be accepted without question or debate. Ex-flag bearer aspirants are leading members, yet sitting members of parliament on the ticket of MPP are not leading members. Even serial commentators call themselves leading members. Wherein lies the value of the title leading member? Would the conference of the second quarter of this year take another look at the abuse of this title? My beef about all this is the extent to which this has been abused by all manner of people to raise funds to support the ostentatious lifestyle of their wives (the ones that the laws of Ghana do not recognize), used to cast the entirety of our party in a very negative light. There are actually some people who classify themselves as leading members but whose faces and voices are enough to swing votes against us, because of what they do and what they stand for: would we sit idly by and continue to look the other way as the title brings the great MPP into disrepute and public ridicule?

And then there are those who now do what many of us used to do a long time ago. Some of them are even angling for executive positions at the highest levels of the great MPP. They think because they talk on radio or appear on TV today, they have suddenly become “leading members” who have sacrificed more than any other person in the party’s annals. For their information, when they were hiding under beds, some of us were confronting his Jerryship the MB 339A flyer as far back as when the first private radio station was established. We served our party when Bartels the Kwamina drove his red Datsun to Dodowa to convert the Danquah-Busia Club to the great MPP in 1992, yet, we don’t aspire to call ourselves leading members. We just served and have continued doing so ever since, never mind that his Kufuorship kept us as far away from his presence as the East is from the West. Truth be told, in the great MPP, there are ‘non-leading’ leading members. Most of these non-leading leading members belong to the group of anti-Kufuorship apparatchiks who as stated above, were so distant from His Gentle Kufuorship. The leaders of the non-leading leading members are quick to tell you “Kufuorship kept some people on the bench as reserves; as for us, we were not even invited into the stadium to be spectators to begin with”. Much as I sympathize with those sentiments, it also holds true and as a research officer of the great MPP (not a leading researcher) I can state emphatically that this is one of the major reasons why these non-leading leading members shall always, and I insist, always oppose anything that remotely smells of His Gentle Kufuorship.

So now that re-evaluation, amendments, proposals and counter-proposals are flying within the ranks of the great MPP, may I humbly submit from my biased corner that His Gentle Kufuorship also makes peace with all those he kept outside the stadium? That would perhaps send a better signal than forcibly extracting sympathy from the unsympathetic when Gbevlo the Lartey next comes for his gates. You see, I suspect that the gate would be taken away, after all the man says he shall take back everything of security value that His Gentle Kufuorship has; is the gate not the product of national security advise and programme? We have not forgotten that there is but one president in this country and for sure, he and His Presidential Attahood alone must bear traits and semblances of the presidential order in the gospel according to Gbevlo, the mustached Lartey!

Before I go let me make this appeal. I am not known to be an appealer, especially because the leading members have cast me firmly into the camp of the lawyer-politician-flagbearer. However, I think it is proper for me to appeal, no, literally beg Boateng the Stephen Asamoah to abort his overtures to Joshua to intervene in their imbroglio with Attahood monks and to seek ‘divine intervention’ for the success of the Order of the Calamari this time round. You see, I am a self-declared anti-Joshualite, for I know him and the spirits he uses to do what he does. Maybe one must ask the Nigerian Charismatic Society and Apostolic Council why they have consistently refused Joshua membership of those bodies. If Joshua is what the uninitiated think he is, how come Boateng the Stephen Asamoah lost his precious Mankessim roundabout? He can never be an intermediary to resolve “hanging matters” between Kufuorship and Attahood posse. Besides, Joshua is to social democracy what Kennedy Agyepong is to property owning; how can he intervene on behalf of the very people he has instructed should be rid of their cars?. If there is any plea, I shall willingly take them to ridge, where real power lieth (not the ECG/GRIDCo power rationing type) to see the master MB-339A flyer. There and only there, shall the arugba have any flirtations with mercy, for those of the great MPP who courtesy His Gentle Kufuorship were in the stadium, sat on the benches and actually played on the field better start accepting that their acts of yesterday are up for scrutiny and as surely as God (not Joshua’s god) reigns in the affairs of men, they and their very dirty laundry shall be duly washed over the airwaves of Accra: you only need to be sneaky around the overenthusiastic 28-year old Deputy arugba Minister to know this basic coming inferno. You see, the arugba minister has been studying a certain matter of passports and how some Malaysian Company got some contract after some Calamari Godfather became High Commissioner…not funny at all. Perhaps and rather tragically, that would form part of the healing process for, on behalf of and in the name of the great MPP. Yahweh shine his countenance upon you till next week when we return with a myriad of new ideas.