NDC is a Party in Search of an Agenda

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

The Ghana News Agency (GNA) recently reported the Greater-Accra Regional Chairman of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to have made the following remark during the course of an interview that Mr. Danny Annan granted the Agency: “Prof. Mills will remain the focus for the development of the country, instead of wasting national resources to hunt for alleged opponents” (Ghanaweb.com 6/16/08).

Exactly what the Greater-Accra NDC Chairman means by Prof. Atta-Mills remaining the focus of the party’s agenda for the development of the country is anybody’s good guess. Does it mean, for instance, that the interest and personality of the former University of Ghana Law School professor and his party supersede the collective and greater interests of Ghana at large? Couple the foregoing with the recent pronouncement of Mr. John Dramani Mahama to the paramount chief and people of the Conja Traditional Area, that the P/NDC is hell-bent on seizing the reins of governance, come Election 2008, and maintaining a hermetic stranglehold on Ghanaians in perpetuity, and it instantly and indubitably becomes clear that the Provisional National Democratic Congress is about anything but the freedom and democratic development of Ghana. Fortunately, Ghanaians have a solid evidentiary record of two decades of P/NDC atrocities to go by.

On another, quite quaint and interesting, level, it appears that the Greater-Accra NDC regional chairman was cheaply attempting to capitalize on Prof. Atta-Mills’ much-vaunted placid and moderate temperament to attract voters who might, otherwise, not listen, twice, to the name of the main opposition party before, literally, taking to their heels, amidst thunderous snorts and hisses.

In any case, the P/NDC Presidential Candidate, himself, prematurely gave the game away, when in the wake of widespread post-electoral mayhem in Kenya, Prof. Atta-Mills had the temerity to adumbrate on the likelihood of Ghana following a similar path should the P/NDC, predictably, fail to trounce the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Election 2008. And so exactly what Mr. Danny Annan hopes to achieve by touting the name of the twice-defeated P/NDC presidential candidate is best known to the speaker himself.

Then also, there needs to be highlighted the fact that in the wake of the publicly stated intention of the former Vice-President of Ghana to take his own country down the delirious post-electoral Kenyan path, should the outcome of Election 2008 not go his way, the British High Commissioner to Ghana promptly summoned Prof. Atta-Mills to his official residence for clarification. The Acting Managing-Director of the Rawlings Corporation would later claim that his remarks had been grossly misinterpreted; he would also cynically claim, further, that the rebirth and development of 21st-Century Ghanaian democracy was the singular handiwork of the P/NDC, rather than it being squarely the handiwork of inescapable global forces of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In sum, those of us who have studiously followed his political fortunes for the last decade-and-halve, are fully convinced that Prof. Atta-Mills is neither a peaceful nor an honest man. At best, the man has tacitly and expediently collaborated with the violent and insidious elements of the P/NDC to wreak untold havoc on the destiny of unsuspecting Ghanaians for some two decades.

It is also interesting to hear the Greater-Accra NDC regional chairman “assure members of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and all other politicians that [the P/NDC] would not be vindictive when it wins the December elections” (Ghanaweb.com 6/16/08).

A brief interpretation on the preceding score is imperative. First of all, Mr. Danny Annan appears to be acknowledging, albeit rather lamely and wistfully, that, indeed, the P/NDC operatives had been vindictive in the past and that, somehow, their 8-year sidelining on the margins of political opposition has sobered these vengeful operatives well enough with good lessons on behavioral statesmanship. But whether such pseudo-contrition would wash with the Ghanaian electorate at large, come December 7, 2008, of course, remains to be seen.

On a more self-righteous level, however, the Greater-Accra NDC Regional Chairman seems to be saying that the Kufuor tenure of the ruling New Patriotic Party has, almost wholly, entailed the commission of untold and unpardonable crimes against members, supporters and sympathizers of the opposition P/NDC which, ordinarily, should necessitate a comprehensive settling of proverbial scores. Indeed, Mr. Alban S. K. Bagbin, the P/NDC minority leader in Ghana’s National Assembly recently hinted at the overriding intention of the Rawlings Corporation to settling “outstanding” scores with the ruling New Patriotic Party, should the P/NDC be voted back to power. Mr. Bagbin tersely summed up his party’s first order of business as follows: “Don’t touch the law on Willfully Causing Financial Loss to the State.”

This threat, it is significant to observe, appeared not to wash with many of those Ghanaians whose mnemonic capacity is sound enough to remember the fact that the law on Willfully Causing Financial Loss to the State was, in fact, minted by the P/NDC. And for those of our readers who may not readily appreciate the immediate and contextual import of this law, we must heartily and unreservedly observe that the law on Willfully Causing Financial Loss to the State squarely and unmistakably points to the rank and abject corruption, as well as the unpardonable decadence, that characterized a complacent, terror-mongering and self-righteous Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) for two protracted decades!

Thus, ultimately, it is not a question of whether the P/NDC deserves to be voted back into the reins of governance; rather, it is a question of when all well-meaning and human rights-loving Ghanaians would come together in order to promptly and permanently proscribe the fascist ideology of immitigable tyranny that constitutes the central agenda of the P/NDC and, of course, the party itself.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.