Only Afoko Could Have Saved Afoko

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

Garden City, New York

Oct. 25, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The what-went-wrongs have already began trickling in, following the long-overdue suspension of Chairman Paul Afoko of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). The difference here, however, is that there are no what-went-wrongs vis-à-vis the decision of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the NPP to indefinitely suspend Mr. Afoko; the proverbial handwriting on the wall has been there for all to see and advise ourselves accordingly, right from the election of Messrs. Afoko and Kwabena Agyei Agyepong at the Tamale Delegates’ Congress (TDC) exactly one year ago. The two lock-stepping men came to play and played royally against the common goal and collective interests of the members, supporters and sympathizers of the New Patriotic Party. And as one avid observer and prolific writer of the Ghanaian political scene recently put it, Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong came to play royally and wantonly against the sacred and inviolable interests of the suffering masses of Ghana.

Well, I don’t know where Dr. Bonsu Osei-Wusu has been at least since 2007, when the events that led to the indefinite suspension of Mr. Afoko actually reached their climax, but it is quite obvious that the political science lecturer of the Methodist University College is grossly mistaken to suppose that a man who is hell-bent on rocking the proverbial boat and sending everybody clutching at straws, as they headed towards the crocodile-infested bottom of the creek, is not one to have hatched a compromise with. The situation was boldly written in black and white. It was inescapably a kill-or-be-killed situation. And in such a situation, the wisest thing to do was to kill in order to survive. And so in “killing” Chairman Afoko, the New Patriotic Party has refreshingly been given a new lease on life. A man who turns down at least four invitations from the highest executive body of the very party of whose chairmanship he had frantically scrambled for, and not been forced at gunpoint to assume, is not one who is constructively desirous of and/or in search of a definitive solution that he may have with his paymasters and mistresses, for that matter. Such a person has an agenda that is immutably antithetical to the agenda of the collective.

In sum, Mr. Afoko was a veritable herbicide who came with a dead-set agenda to kill and destroy all the weeds and trees of the forest; and this is precisely what he was doing when the reality check was visited on his pate by the New Patriotic Party’s National Council of Elders and the party’s Disciplinary Committee. Chairman Afoko had more than amply demonstrated that he had absolutely no respect for the standing rules and orders of the NPP. In short, the man envisaged himself to be way above the laws and interests of the party. Well, rather than savvily admonish their client to pick up the proverbial broken pieces and move on with his life, Mr. Afoko’s lawyers, we are told, have decided to insult the intelligence of the entire party constabulary by publicly announcing that the decision by the NPP-NEC to indefinitely relieve the callous captain of the ship who deliberately set the same alight, while also adamantly refusing to have the flame-engulfed SS-NPP doused and opportunely restored to health, of his post – apologies to the memory of Mr. Adams Mahama – and to his own devices in perpetuity, is a sham which these “book-long” lawyers intend to fiercely battle in court.

Maybe these attorneys have a far better chance of explaining to the general Ghanaian public how “constitutionally sound” it was when Chairman Afoko decided to ride roughshod over the established authority of the NPP-NEC by summarily dismissing the NPP’s Director of Finance. I told you, Dr. Bonsu Osei-Wusu, right at the beginning of this “paperly” conversation, that Chairman Afoko came with an agenda to destroy and destroy thoroughly any chances of the New Patriotic Party at the 2016 polls, as well as the party’s steady and onward stride towards the Kufuor-reconstructed Jubilee-Flagstaff House. In sum, you cannot save a man who has more than amply demonstrated that he is well beyond redemption. You only give such a nihilist ample rope with a generous noose to hang himself.

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