Mr. Agyapong, Get This Loud And Clear: The People Have Spoken!

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

Garden City, New York

Sept. 1, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

They went into Sunday's New Patriotic Party Super-Delegates' Congress vowing to cause an electoral Tsunami. In the end, they barely managed to create the proverbial storm in a teacup. And so it ought to be clear to headquarters Kyerematen shills like Mr. Kwabena Agyapong, my Prempeh College classmate and General-Secretary of the New Patriotic Party, that however desperately hard they try, he and his Alan Cash partisans, including party chairman, Paul Afoko, cannot reverse the clear and clean course of history on the ground.

And now, it would also be criminally foolhardy for the NPP scribe to think that he can vacuously and egotistically stick to the party's Constitution by insisting, against common sense and the general consensus, both official and unofficial, that the October Congress, originally scheduled for the election of a presidential candidate for the party, ought to come off as scheduled, irrespective of the epic and resounding trouncing of his prized political race horse (See "October Congress Won't Be Cancelled - Kwabena Agyapong" Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/1/14).

And here, it may be recalled that the entire idea of a Super-Delegates' Congress was inserted into the NPP Constitution in order to meliorate the characteristically chaotic periodic vying for the flagbearership of Ghana's main opposition political party. Sunday's Congress was supposed to reduce the number of presidential candidacy aspirants from seven to five. I, personally, felt that the Super-Delegates' Congress ought to have been made to reduce the number of serious presidential candidacy aspirants from whatever the maximum number might have been, to the more practicable number of three, as it appears to stand presently.

Whatever the case may be, Nana Akufo-Addo's commanding clinching of 80-plus-percentage points of the total valid Super-Delegates' votes ought to put paid to any doubts in the minds of his six rivals, going into Sunday's Congress. Already, two aspirants have been sorted out of the running, with two others having announced, as if this writing, that they intended to proceed no more. They have, apparently, received enough political beatings to last them the rest of their careers.

The two who remain in contention have a combined total votes of about 10 percentage points. And yes, Mr. Agyapong, as party scribe, has every right to insist on sticking to the October schedule of the plenary party Delegates' Congress for the official election and crowning of the 2016 NPP presidential candidate. The fact of the matter, however, is that the ultimate judgment call of whether the October Congress ought to come off as scheduled or not, rests with the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the New Patriotic Party and/or the National Executive Council of the same.

What needs to be drummed, loud and clear, into the ears of Mr. Agyapong is that, like all political constitutions, the constitutional provision (or amendment) that brought the October Delegates' Congress into being can be promptly amended by a unanimous expurgation/proscription compact or consensus. And I don't suppose that Mr. Agyapong intends to unwisely reprise the cynical Kyerematen game of deliberately attempting to stall the smooth sailing of the 2016 Akufo-Addo Presidential Campaign, primarily because he has been resoundingly rejected by core NPP delegates and supporters.

If, indeed, Mr. Agyapong is hell-bent on pursuing his putative Agenda 2020 program by mischievously surrendering the promising triumphal fortunes of the New Patriotic Party, in chimerical hopes of putting his former boss, Mr. Alan John Kwadwo "Quitman" Kyerematen, into the proverbial horse's saddle, then he had better be extremely careful not to be ruthlessly crushed to pulp by the Akufo-Addo political juggernaut, otherwise known as the will of the people.

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