Selection of NAPO as Bawumia's running mate is a double-edged sword

We have already discussed this matter umpteen times before; however, for the sake of the record books and posterity, we have decided to examine some strategically important aspects of the double-edged sword that is/was the selection of Dr. Matthew Yaw Opoku-Prempeh, a Manhyia Palace scion, as the 2024 Presidential-Election Running Mate of Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia (See “Majority caucus fully supports NAPO as Bawumia's running mate — Afenyo-Markin” Modernghana.com 6/30/24).

It is a double-edged sword because the selection of NAPO, as Dr. Opoku-Prempeh is popularly known in Ghana, seeks to accomplish two things, one of which is unarguably positive and strategically constructive and may very well exemplify the statesmanship and political genius of the proverbial and legendary Leprechaun of Kyebi and Akyem-Abomosu.

In this context, the selection of Dr. Opoku-Prempeh as the running mate of Dr. Bawumia is almost certain to aptly bridge the hitherto seemingly intractable and widely acknowledged animosity between the Agyekum-Kufuor/Mpiani and the Akufo-Addo factions of the New Patriotic Party.

This long-running spirit of bad blood and ancient hostilities may very well have cost the proverbial Elephant at least two consecutive general elections, namely, the 2008 and the 2012 General Elections, as wistfully and almost apologetically disclosed by a politically defensive and chastened Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani recently.

In his apologia – or shall we say, politically defensive dissertation? – the old Prempeh College, presently Senior High School, mate and the two-term Chief-of-Staff of the Agyekum-Kufuor Presidency, the very last Fourth-Republican government to have occupied the old Danish-constructed slave-marketing fort at Osu, Accra, grossly misidentified as The Osu Castle, bitterly complained, as Yours Truly vividly recalls, that as the Presidential Campaign Manager of the late Prof. Albert A. Adu-Boahen, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had deliberately and invidiously sandbagged the presidential ambition of then-Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor.

This, in effect, wholly justified the decision by the Agyekum-Kufuor faction of the New Patriotic Party to deliver the Akwamufie monarchical scion a vintage taste of Nana Akufo-Addo’s own bad medicine in turn and return.

At any rate, the selection of NAPO as the 2024 Presidential Running Mate of Alhaji Bawumia has almost automatically positioned the twice consecutively elected New Patriotic Party to break the so-called Jinxy-8. This is coupled with the incontrovertible fact of the Akufo-Addo-led and Bawumia-partnered lame-duck Akufo-Addo Administration has unimpeachably carved for itself a niche and a performance track record without comparison or match among the previous three National Democratic Congress-sponsored Fourth-Republican regimes, viz., the regimes of the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, and the present Serial and Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. John “Moscow Joe” Dramani Mahama, whom the Founding Father of the latter political establishment perennially and incessantly described as the most thoroughly corrupt postcolonial Ghanaian leader.

The downside or strategic drawback of NAPO’s selection as the 2024 Presidential Running Mate of Vice-President Bawumia has already become amply evident in the seemingly abject lack of rhetorical tact on the part of the former Education Minister and, subsequently, the Akufo-Addo-shuffled Energy Minister.

This includes the politically and morally infelicitous manner in which Candidate Opoku-Prempeh characterized the heroic and yeomanly achievements of Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, the immortalized Prime Minister and, shortly thereafter, President Kwame Nkrumah, as a political figure and personality who solely and exclusively belonged in the ideological camp of Marxist-leaning Ghanaian politicians of the institutional establishment of the Convention People’s Party (CPP).

But even on the latter count, NAPO was doing or saying absolutely nothing out of kilter with the routine political practice of former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, the man who, like the immortalized and legendary Mr. Kofi (Atta Busumuru) Annan, the first Indigenous Continental African to have been elected United Nations Secretary-General, never hesitated to let all who cared to know and listen that Uncle Kofi/Fiifi had absolutely no soft stomach for the sort of one-person and one-party dictatorship set in motion in both Ghana and almost the entire African continent by Mr. Kwame Nkrumah and his so-called Convention People’s Party for some 15 years.

Still, Candidate Opoku-Prempeh needs to be constantly reminded of the fact that even The Asantehene, His Majesty, Sir Osei Agyeman-Prempeh II, was officially a staunch supporter of President Nkrumah, as were Vice-President Bawumia’s father and grandfather, the Mamprugu/Mamprusi Paramount Chief.

Only The Okyenhene, Osagyefo Nana Sir Ofori-Atta II, and a few other influential and prominent legitimately invested Ghanaian chieftains or monarchs in the country frontally and heroically stood up to the political depravity and personal bullying of President Kwame Nkrumah and the key operatives of his Convention People’s Party, with the Nzema-Nkroful native also literally desecrating the historically inherited title of “Osagyefo” of the Okyenhene.

Recently, Yours Truly read a rather comical, quaint, and, to be certain, morally untenable narrative in which the author cavalierly sought to justify this epic self-serving betrayal of their people and the Ghanaian citizenry at large by several of these most powerful and influential monarchs. They caved into the political bullying of President Nkrumah, cardboard fashion, as a laudable and strategically savvy response to the flagrant personal humiliation of these legitimately invested traditional rulers.

Yours Truly found the entire apology to be a rather lame and futile exercise and one that was utterly unnecessary. You see, ultimately, what needs to be underscored here, more than anything else, is the imperative need for the establishment leadership and stalwarts of the self-proclaimed Neoliberal New Patriotic Party to ensure, in the memorable words of a lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, that the cultural practice of democratic decision-making is deepened by the creation of a healthily decentralized democratic culture that draws centripetally the peripheralized or marginalized overwhelming majority of the Sovereign Ghanaian People.

In the equally memorable words of the globally renowned Kenyan educator, thinker, essayist, and novelist, Prof. (James) Ngugi wa Thiong’O, it is long past time to move the centre to the “Real Center,” which is actually the periphery where the overwhelming majority of Indigenous Africans live and who, by the way, constitute the vast wealth of the socioeconomic and geopolitical sustenance of our Global Village.