Positive Intolerance Is Good For NPP

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

Let's get one thing clear: there is a glaring distinction between salutary democratic discursive dissension and factionalism. And New Patriotic Party members like Messrs. Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe, Charles Wereko-Brobbey, Kwame Pianim and Arthur Kennedy are nihilistic factionalists who are hell-bent on using the party as a primary instrument of self-aggrandizement, failure of which achievement effectively renders the party a political bottleneck that ought to be either promptly demolished or radically maligned out a viable existence. And this is precisely what these men have been doing for sometime now (See "Intolerance Eating Away NPP - Nyaho-Tamakloe" Ghanaweb.com 7/12/13).

Indeed, if "intolerance" were such a bad proposition, as Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe seems to be suggesting, then the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress (NDC) would have folded ages ago. For instance, what was so remarkably tolerant about Mr. Rawlings' infamous Swedru Declaration that effectively imposed the presidential candidacy of the now-late Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills on the NDC for three consecutive electoral seasons? And the likes of Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe would have the rest of us believe that insisting on a progressive agenda of unity of purpose, such as resolutely fighting off the flagrant bastardization of Ghana's Fourth Republican constitutional democracy by the key operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress, is unhealthy for the development of the kind of peaceful and civilized society that many a levelheaded Ghanaian citizen craves.

You see, the beauty of the kind of political culture prevalent in Ghana today makes it fairly a matter of course for people who vehemently disagree with the political stance held by the majority of any significant political organization to break away and establish their own political race-horse, and then legally register the latter in our national electoral derby and ran crazy with the same, as they so desire. After all, did not Dr. Wereko-Brobbey form his so-called United Ghana Movement to contest Election 2012 as the presidential candidate for the same? And just who bribed him to abandon the UGM and join the ranks of the membership of the NPP?

Indeed, for a man the value of whose trustworthiness may be the cheapest ever to be assessed, or priced, among the top-echelons of the New Patriotic Party, Dr. Wereko-Brobbey ought to be singing the praises of the party that made him a recognizable national political figure every moment of his waking life. And if Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe cares to be told this: it is his supercillious attitude that makes Dr. Wereko-Brobbey falsely believe that he is more important than the entire membership of the NPP that is being castigated, rather than simply because Tarzan chooses to scandalize the NPP in the court of Ghanaian public opinion.

Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe himself is of the same cynical ideological breeding as the man he so predictably feels compelled to defending. Both men "cardiographically" belong in the ring-side corner of Mr. John Dramani Mahama and have not hesitated to own up to the same. Not long ago, for instance, Dr. Wereko-Brobbey publicly signalled Mr. Mahama of his willingness to offer the latter his supposed secret to running an effective Volta River Authority. That was the height of chutzpah - for the screaming irony here, of course, is the fact that as CEO of VRA, Dr. Wereko-Brobbey had demonstrated such unprecedented administrative incompetence that he had to be summarily relieved of his post by President John Agyekum-Kufuor, the very man who had appointed him to the same.

What is significant to recall here, though, is the fact that at the time of his self-pimping overtures to the NDC spearhead, I predicted in these very pages - or column - that Dr. Wereko-Brobbey's chances of being invited by President Mahama to be the latter's paid adviser on energy was as good as the former's selling the period-sullied tampons of a jilted woman. My profuse apologies are, of course, promptly and duly rendered to our dear mothers, sisters, wives and daughters.

The rather shallow and logically lame principle of people like Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe appears to be predicated on quixotically, albeit deviously, playing the innocent and unprovokingly savaged underdog, in vacuous hopes of swaying undeserved public sympathy their way. I bet Ghanaians are darn too astute, discerning and ideologically sophisticated to fall for such tripe.

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York July 13, 2012 E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net ###