On the Run: NDC has always been known to be a party of seasoned bullies

Ambassador Tony Aidoo exposes himself as a hypocrite when former Ghana’s Chief Diplomat to the Netherlands pretends not to be fully aware of the fact that the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has absolutely no enviable track-record of democratic justice and the savory political culture of fair play (See “Mahama Shouldn’t Have Addressed Congress – NDC Stalwart” Modernghana.com 11/20/18). The Atta-Mills’ Minister for Policy Monitoring and Evaluation has mordantly criticized the organizers of his party’s 9th Delegates’ Congress for egregiously breaking the rules of fair play by permitting former President John Dramani Mahama to address party delegates who will soon be voting to elect the NDC’s 2020 Presidential Election Nominee or Candidate, knowing full well that the former President has publicly and officially announced his intention to contest the party’s presidential primary.

Some staunch Mahama supporters, as was to be expected, have strongly begged to disagree with Dr. Aidoo on grounds that Mr. Mahama had not been invited by the organizers of the NDC’s 9th Delegates’ Congress to address the delegates in his capacity as a presidential-nominee hopeful or contestant but, rather, as a former President of Ghana and a senior party member. Of course, I find the latter argument to be very problematic and downright disingenuous because it deviously underestimates the apparently de-facto endorsement of the man who massively lost the 2016 Presidential Election to then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of the then-main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). But, of course, the irony of the name of the venue where the most recent NDC’s Delegates’ Congress took place, of “Fantasy Dome,” is not lost on the keen observer of Fourth-Republican Ghanaian political culture.

The former Anthropology lecturer of the University of Cape Coast is smack on point when he firmly asserts that in view of Mr. Mahama’s official declaration of his intention to contest for the party’s nomination for the 2020 Presidential Election, all party members who had thrown their proverbial hats in the ring, in the leadup to last week’s Delegates’ Congress, ought to have also been invited to address the convention. Here again, contrary to what the NDC’s Founding-Patriarch, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, would have Ghanaians and the rest of the global community believe, affording equal opportunity to all candidates vying for the party’s 2020 Presidential Nomination to address the conferees in the “Fantasy Dome,” would have unseemly veered the dictatorial culture of the National Democratic Congress too dangerously close to the far more salutary, even if also at times chaotic, democratic culture and tradition of the New Patriotic Party.

Matters were also not the least bit meliorated, as we learn, by the fact that the democratically ousted former President’s electioneering campaign songs were loudly and shamelessly played in the “Fantasy Dome.” Well, literally caught with their pants down, hung and all, we also learn the inexcusably nonsensical story about the decision of the organizers of the NDC’s 9th Delegates’ Congress of launching a full-scale investigation into the Mahama Coup, pun intended, of course. Needless to say, there is absolutely nothing worth investigating here; indeed, if anything at all, the electorally preemptive Mahama Coup strikingly recalls the infamous Swedru Declaration, in which Chairman Rawlings made it loud and clear to the rank-and-file membership of his “revolutionary” political machine operatives that when it comes to deciding the question of who becomes the Presidential Nominee of the NDC, only one man’s opinion matters here. And that one man, you guessed right, Dear Reader, is none other than the bloody Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress.

At any rate, it was not clear, as of this writing, that Chairman Rawlings, whose eldest daughter and Klottey-Korle Member of Parliament, Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, has been widely and publicly rumored to be a fetching or choice candidate of a running-mate for Mr. Mahama, was in the know about this patent act of mischief. Very likely, the bloody Chairman was blindsided like the rest of the NDC’s hoodlum pack. In the recent past, for example, Togbui Avaklasu, I, has not hesitated in describing his onetime Communications Minister as indisputably the most corrupt postcolonial Ghanaian leader. Chairman Rawlings’ wife and Ghana’s longest-serving First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, has also publicly asserted that “John Mahama cannot be trusted,” and even once fiercely fought then-Candidate John Evans Atta-Mills, late, over the latter’s, in retrospect, apocalyptically scandalous and grossly misguided decision to make the Bole-Bamboi native his running-mate in the runup to the 2008 Presidential Election.

Which is why one finds it extremely difficult to believe that the bloody couple would consent to having their daughter enter into a political marriage with this grossly incompetent, payola-prone, conjugally promiscuous, pathologically ungrateful and untrustworthy sometime Atta-Mills’ Presidential Spare Tire. Then again, who said politics has not been known to make strange bedfellows?

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net