By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 28, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
You know this tired maxim already: “Show me your friend.” Many of you may have so soon been forced to focus on your own personal daily cares, largely as a result of the grossly incompetent management of the socioeconomic affairs of the country by the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), as to have completely forgotten the real and true identity of the National Chairman of the ruling party. Well, he is the kleptocratic Mr. Kofi Portuphy, former Head of NADMO, the National Disaster Management Organization. He was the substantive occupant of the latter position when Monsieur Rawlings, evidently fed up with the performance and public antics of Dr. Kwabena Adjei, or for whatever reasons best known to the NDC’s founding father, backed Mr. Portuphy to oust the former.
What I want to highlight here, however, is the fact that Mr. Portuphy would flatly refuse to resign his NADMO post for quite an unduly while and continue to draw salaries from both positions, until he had fully satisfied his greed and thievish instincts. We must also add that the Constitution of Fourth-Republican Ghana does not permit the Chairman of any ruling party to occupy a cabinet-level portfolio at the same time that he is actively and fully engaged as Chief Administrator at party headquarters. Mr. Portuphy, while NADMO head, also scandalously demonstrated his abject lack of both personal and professional integrity. He would expediently consent to having Ms. Anita D’Souza named as his NADMO deputy chief without any qualms, until Ms. D’Souza decided to opt for the outgoing Mr. Portuphy’s position.
Literally out of the blue, Mr. Portuphy would publicly announce to the nation that the woman who had been studiously deputizing for him for nearly two years, or temporally thereabouts, was, after all, not qualified for the job. In sum, we are talking about a man who, like most of his party friends and associates, has absolutely no integrity whatsoever. And this is the very personality whom President John Dramani Mahama would have Ghanaians believe is a far better party Chairman than Mr. Freddie Blay, owner-publisher of the Daily Guide newspaper and the recently named Acting Chairman of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).
It may be recalled that Mr. Mahama, while on the stumps in the Volta Region recently, was widely reported to have mocked the perfectly legitimate decision by all three major disciplinary bodies of the New Patriotic Party to indefinitely suspend Chairman Paul A. Afoko, a man who may well have had a hand in the brutal acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, then-Upper-East Regional Chairman of the NPP. You see, the leaders of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress have the unenviable track-record of killing off their political rivals and opponents and feeling comfortable and cozy about the same, and going back to business as usual.
Which is why these NDC movers-and-shakers visibly appear to be having such a hard time both understanding and coming to terms with the fact that among the top-echelon membership of the New Patriotic Party, the sort of dirty politics that is the bona fide hallmark of the Rawlingses and the Tsikatas and their followers and associates is not tolerated among the scions of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Traditionalists. You see, Mr. Mahama would be better off worrying about the fact of forcibly running for his party’s presidential re-nomination unopposed – and here, of course, we have the scandalous episode of Mr. George Boateng in mind – and yet having his re-nomination bid roundly rejected by a whopping 61,000 party delegates. We have just even learned from Mr. Rachel Appoh, the NDC-MP for Gomoa-Central and former Deputy Minister for Children and Gender Protection, that she personally had to induce some delegates with bribes in order to get the number of rejection votes drastically reduced from several thousands to just 350 negative votes.
And the reason? Well, essentially because “Ganja Boy” has demonstrated gross leadership incompetence in the eyes of these Gomoa-Central constituents. If the indefinitely suspended Chairman Afoko held a press conference at the same time that his legitimately named replacement was holding a press conference to answer blasphemous charges by President Mahama that Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the 2016 New Patriotic Party’s Vice-Presidential Candidate and former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana, has absolutely no right, whatsoever, to criticize Mr. Mahama for criminally mismanaging the people’s money and capital resources, this is primarily because it is Mr. Afoko’s teeming supporters among the top-leadership of the National Democratic Congress, including President Mahama, who set the suspended party chief up to such reckless and feckless mischief.
Mr. Mahama may have also seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall, thus his abject desperation, windmill tilting and shadow-boxing with a man against whom he will not even be contesting the presidency come December 2016. Maybe the Bole-Bamboi chieftain needs to hear the Seikwa native and his uncle-in-law wax eloquently thusly: “Monkeys play by sizes.”
