Don’t be silly, Mr. Abdulah Abubakari!

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

The National Democratic Congress’ 2016 parliamentary candidate for the Walewale constituency, in the Northern Region, may not like to hear this, but it is the grossly incompetent leadership of President John Dramani Mahama, the so-called Northern Star, that has made the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) the hulking and messy white elephant that it is today.

On the educational, health and labor fronts, the former Atta-Mills second-bananas (the Northern Star preferred to sarcastically call himself the Atta-Mills “Spare-Tire”) has achieved little that is worth writing proudly about for the edification and benefit of Ghanaians and the rest of the global community (See “NPP Warned Over ‘Incompetent Mahama’ Tag” 3News.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/25/16).

Mr. Abdulah Abubakari is quite accurate that the leadership of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) could do much better to put the party in a stronger position to handily defeat the ruling National Democratic Congress in the December 7 election.

On the latter count, the local NDC hack must rest assured that it is only a matter of weeks before the perennially bumbling Mahama Posse is dislodged from the Flagstaff House. He may also be right that losing two elections back-to-back, or consecutively, on the part of the three-time Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party, is no competent achievement to brag about.

Still, if he had been sedulously watching political events on the ground, the Walewale native would have heard the General-Secretary of his own party, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia (aka General Mosquito), in the wake of the 2012 presidential election apologetically confess publicly on radio that it was the abject lack of vigilance on the part of the NPP’s polling operatives that facilitated the electoral victory of the then-Interim President Mahama.

In simple “bugabuga” terms, and in case Mr. Abubakari is hard of hearing, in the opinion of Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, the former NDC-MP for Gonja-West literally stole Election 2012 from Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

If there is disunity in the NPP, as Mr. Abubakari disdainfully claims and gloats, it is largely because the scions of the Danquah, Busia and Dombo family, unlike their counterparts of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress, take democracy far more seriously than the NDC operatives whose dissenters are routinely run out of the party, rather than having their genuine grievances and concerns heard and amicably resolved.

But what is even more important to note is that notwithstanding the preceding all-too-natural problems of a party that takes democratic protocol more seriously than any other party of its size and caliber in the country, the decision by the party’s delegates to nominate Akufo-Addo three times for the presidency ought to inform Mr. Abubakari and his NDC associates of the fact that at least - a full-half of the Ghanaian electorate sees something special in the auspicious possibility of an Akufo-Addo presidency, very likely one that they deem to be far and away better than what President Mahama has been offering and/or dishonestly passing off as a progressive and democratic leadership.

Even more significantly, Mr. Abubakari and his associates need to recognize and laud the fact that nearly every one of the anti-Akufo-Addo NPP stalwarts who have taken their grievances to any of the country’s legitimately constituted courts of law has been soundly defeated.

The same, of course, cannot be said of Mr. George Boateng, the 46-year-old former NDC constituency youth organizer, who was bold enough to challenge the abysmally poor leadership of President Mahama. And so, yes, the Walewale NDC parliamentary candidate has every right to be annoyed by the NPP leadership’s tagging of Mr. Mahama as the “Incompetent Mahama,” just as the global community once tagged the white-racist regime of South Africa as the “Apartheid South African Regime.”

What Mr. Abubakari has absolutely no right to do is to cavalierly presume to dictate to the NPP leaders and their supporters and sympathizers how to envisage and label, or tag, the man who has almost single-handedly irreparably ruined their lives and fortunes.