Don't Be Ridiculous, Kwesi Yorke And His Hangers-On

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

Garden City, New York

Feb. 27, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

It was perfectly in order for the Speaker of the House, Mr. Edward Doe Adjaho, and the Parliamentary Majority Leader not to invite the executive officers of the Nduom-owned and chaperoned Progressive People's Party (PPP) to sit in on the 2015 State-of-the-Nation Address presented by President John Dramani Mahama (See "Parliament Cannot Shut Its Doors On Us - PPP" Ghana News Agency / Ghanaweb.com 2/27/15).

It was perfectly in order because the rump-Convention People's Party splinter group has not earned its keep, as it were; the PPP has no seat in parliament, so like the rest of ordinary Ghanaian citizenry, the leadership of the PPP had to content itself with either listening to the Mahama address on their radio or television sets. They, of course, had the third option of tuning out the speech altogether.

And so it is rather laughable for Mr. Kofi Asamoah-Siaw, the National Secretary of the PPP, to accuse the Parliamentary Speaker and the Mahama government of flagrantly breaching protocol by ignoring Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom and his hirelings on the exective council of the so-called Progressive People's Party. There is no act of discrimination here committed on the part of the Speaker of the House and/or the Parliamentary Majority Leader and his Minority counterparts; these bona fide representatives of the people merely followed the laid-down tenets of Ghana's 1992 Republican Constitution, regarding who could or could not attend the hearing of the Mahama address.

I am also quite certain that none of the leaders of the other duly registered political parties in the country with no parliamentary seats were invited to witness President Mahama's State-of-the-Nation Address. One or two individuals may have been invited by their parliamentary friends and associates; and this is perfectly legitimate. Making a special pleading for the Speaker, or whoever is responsible for parliamentary protocol, to have made an exception on behalf of the PPP, by issuing an official invitation to the leadership of the latter party, is patently beyond the absurd. It is inexcusably corrupt.

Then also, I sincerely doubt if President Kwame Nkrumah would have allowed the PPP to slip through the cracks, were Ghana's first postcolonial leader alive and still holding the fort, as it were. I make the preceding observation, of course, because the PPP is the latest faction to part ways with the Samia Yaba Nkrumah-led rump-Convention People's Party. And if the rump-CPP leadership had been invited to witness President Mahama's address, this was primarily because the r-CPP has at least one seat in parliament.

Mr. Asamoah-Siaw's post-facto screams about discrimination gets the PPP hack and his party absolutely nowhere; rather, it makes the PPP National Secretary seem incurably pathetic. It also, albeit inadvertently, paints an eerie portrait of the caliber of the men and women who constitute the executive membership of the Progressive People's Party, and who would have ceded to them the democratic reins of governance by the Ghanaian electorate, seem to be the least deserving of such honor.

In essence, it is inexcusably ironic for a people who claim to fully appreciate the significance of a salutary democratic culture to be vehemently agitating against the same. Instead of pettily bickering over absolutely nothing, Mr. Asamoah-Siaw and his boss ought to be working assiduously towards gaining a legitimate foothold in parliament come Election 2016. For needless to say, nothing valuable comes easily and cheaply on a silver platter. And it is a darn shame that the PPP National Secretary does not seem to have learned this most basic of teachable lessons while growing up.

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