Party School Deja-Vu

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

On his return from a recent visit to China, at the head of a six-person delegation, the General-Secretary of Ghana's ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) was reported to have announced the establishment of a school meant to specially train members of the NDC students' wing on the art of governance. The school, whose name and curricular contours have yet to be publicly disclosed, has the primary objective of training these students to eventually fill up leadership positions in the party (See "NDC To Blow Cash On Party's School" Spyghana.com [Politics] 5/11/14).

Any attempt to write off this seemingly all-too-jaded bid to returning our country to the miserable era of the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP) will be a great mistake. What needs to be done, presently, is for the key operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) to lay out a plan geared towards the establishment of a parallel school to countervail the clearly insidious attempt by the operatives of the Mahama government to entrench itself by the use of dirty commnist political tactics.

This may also necessitate the executive membership of the NPP's sending out delegations to such great citadels of constitutional democratic culture as the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan, Canada, France and Australia in order to closely study the modes of leadership transfer from our current crop of adult-leaders to our youths and/or college students. In particular, organizational strategies at the grassroots level ought to be accorded special attention.

The NPP leadership also ought to establish an Intelligence-Gathering Wing of the party, if it does not already have such a structure in place. For it goes without saying that within the next several months, depending on when the NDC's ideological institute - for that is what it veritably amounts to - begins operation, lecturers from China, suavely and deftly disguised as technical advisers and development experts, would be swarming the country to facilitate the effective rigging up of our next general election in favor of the bumbling Mahama regime.

In sum, any attempt to underestimate the steely determination of the NDC nation-wreckers to effectively hijack our fledgling, albeit robust, democratic culture is bound to have apocalyptic repercussions for the rest of the country. What General Mosquito, as Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketiah, the NDC General-Secretary is widely known, is doing strikingly recalls a similar strategy initiated by the Nkrumah regime during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the National Coordinator of the so-called Young Pioneers' Movement (YPM), Mr. Shardow, conducted an extensive tour of post-Hitler's East Germany, the so-called German Democratic Republic, as well as several other erstwhile Eastern-Bloc countries to study the political and strategic organization of the youths of these countries.

Of course, having largely schooled in the West, Nkrumah was mischievously smart enough to deviously include one or two Western nations among the list of countries to be understudied, primarily as a means of throwing dust into the eyes of any potential cynics and reasonably suspicious critics on the right side of the political divide, as it were. The end result, predictably, was the veritable reign-of-terror visited on Ghanaians for which Nkrumah became widely notorious in the wake of his auspicious overthrow in 1966.

Mr. Asiedu-Nketiah and his associates and minions are wide awake to the fact that the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party, the NDC's most formidable opponents, are epically caught up in the petty struggle over who leads the NPP into the Election 2016 electoral Armageddon. Which is why they have waited until now to attempt to pull a fast one over the heads of well-meaning and levelheaded Ghanaian citizens. Chairman Paul Afoko and General-Secretary Kwabena Agyei Agyepong ought to sit up and take studious notice before they find themselves rolling bloody under the proverbial bus.

It is also temporally imperative for Parliament to promptly set up an auditing and monitoring mechanism to closely surveil the activities of all the legally registered political parties in the country, in particular the two major political parties.

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

Board Member, The Nassau Review

May 11, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

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