By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 13, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
Who is Papa Kwesi Nduom fooling, when he serves public notice that unless gangster violence between members and supporters of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) is brought to a definitive halt, he may be forced to form a gangster group of his own? (See "NPP, NDC Have No Monopoly Over Violence - Nduom Warns" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/13/15). Don't get me wrong here, Dr. Nduom is perfectly right on the need for President Mahama to step up to the plate and put an immediate halt to violence as an integral equation to Ghana's electoral culture.
Still, it is rather amusing to hear the big-time entrepreneur pretend as if the politics of violence in Ghana has no well-documented historical antecedents. To be certain, the Convention People's Party (CPP), which Dr. Nduom represented in Parliament for several terms, is widely known to have infused Ghanaian politics with a level of violence that was virtually unknown to the country prior to June 12, 1949, when the Nkrumah-led CPP broke away from the Danquah- and Grant-led seminal United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) - (See Dennis Austin's Politics In Ghana: 1946-1960). Dr. Nduom, a self-proclaimed Young Pioneer pupil, was a staunch Nkrumacrat and an intransigent Cii-Pii-Pii-Ite, until he had a tearful falling out with Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, the deposed dictator's pathologically presumptuous daughter, whom Dr. Nduom had hoped to suavely and expediently used to further his vaulting political ambitions.
We must also bear in mind that in 2008, the former Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem rump-CPP-MP fielded himself as the Presidential Candidate of the CPP. And so vehemently attempting to distance himself from the bloody and pathologically corrupt history of the Nkrumaist CPP of old, as it were, will not be easy. It is also rather pathetic that the former Kufuor cabinet appointee finds it hard to differentiate his personal investments and wealth from the Sovereign Republic of Ghana. He quaintly tends to envisage Ghana as being synonymous with his personal wealth and property. This may explain why he comes off to his legion critics and detractors as a man with an inordinate sense of presidential entitlement.
In the wake of the wanton acts of violence that characterized the July 7 Talensi by-election, this was what Dr. Nduom was widely reported to have told a broadcast journalist: "It is not because I am not capable of competing boot-by-boot [sic]. I have invested my sweat, emotions, everything in this country. If I do not work to keep Ghana together, who will? Many people have hidden their funds overseas, in [sic] safer shores. Mine is visible, right here in Ghana. I have a responsibility to my family, my customers and business partners to be a responsible Ghanaian. I am a public servant, not a career politician."
It is interesting to hear Dr. Nduom sarcastically describe himself as a "public servant" and not a "career politician." Maybe the University of Wisconsin-educated expert in Business Management may want to explain to his audience, precisely what kind of "public servant" breaks away from one political party to establish and own another, especially when his bitter public parting of ways with the key operatives of the rump-Convention People's Party was inescapably and primarily predicated on internal power struggle? Then also, what kind of "public servant" would Dr. Nduom have both his supporters and opponents envisage him to be?
Anyway, for the benefit of those of our readers who may not know this, Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom is the bona fide proprietor and major funder of the rump-CPP breakaway Progressive People's Party (PPP). In the lead-up to the Talensi by-election, Dr. Nduom had vowed to cause an unprecedented electoral upset. Alas, when the dust settled, amidst reports of mayhem and intimidation, Dr. Nduom's Progressive People's Party was nowhere to be found. And so his threat to militarize his devoted workers and sympathizers in the lead-up to Election 2016 is quite understandable, even if it were aptly deemed to be both legally and morally untenable.
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