Stay In Your NDC Lane, Kwesi Pratt!!!

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

Garden City, New York

May 27, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He has said publicly time and time again that rather than help the relatively more progressive New Patriotic Party (NPP) resume reins of governance, he would staunchly back even the most regressive and administratively incompetent National Democratic Congress (NDC) government to retain power in perpetuity. He also claims to be a bona fide rump-Convention People's Party (r-CPP) operative. But, interestingly, recent investigations have revealed that Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jr., is not a card-carrying member of the Samia Yaba Nkrumah-led party in good standing.

What the foregoing simply means is that Mr. Pratt lacks the sort of credibility necessary to offer a balanced and meaningful opinion or advice on the raging wrangling among some key players of Ghana's main opposition New Patriotic Party. On the call by an overwhelming majority of the party's regional executives for National Chairman Paul Afoko and General-Secretary Kwabena Agyei Agyepong to step down, following strong circumstantial evidence linking these two top administrators to the acid-dousing assassinaton of Upper-East Regional Chairman Adams Mahama, Mr. Pratt's gut reaction was to also call for the resignation of the NPP's Presidential Candidate for Election 2016 (See "Afoko/Agyapong[sic] Should Step Down If Akufo-Addo Resigns - Pratt" Peacefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/27/15).

Of course, it makes perfect sense that the man who has been maligning the three-time presidential candidate of the country's largest oppostion party, ever since anyone can remember, should call for Nana Akufo-Addo to step down as a logical induction to getting Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong to step aside for the election/appointment of a new administrative leadership for the New Patriotic Party. Of course, it is Mr. Pratt's democratic right to freely express even such insufferably repugnant and absurd opinion. The opinion of the editor-publisher of the so-called Insight newspaper is criminally absurd, because it presupposes that the resignation of Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong would not end the bitter infighting raging within the party. It is absurd because it is none of the frigging business or lookout of the man who has never wished the New Patriotic Party well, to begin with.

What is also interesting to note here is that Mr. Pratt clearly appreciates the fact that Mr. Afoko may have had a direct hand in the acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama who, until his brutal demise on May 21, was the Upper-East's Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party. But, somehow, the man who makes quite a handsome living gabbing about the business and affairs of other people does not, in any way, appreciate the practically incontrovertible fact that Mr. Agyapong has been walking in lock-step with Chairman Afoko ever since the sinister pair took over the administrative affairs of the NPP's national headquarters. They are a sinister pair because anybody who has followed the party's affairs for any considerable temporal span recognizes the fact that the two men came to party headquarters with the overriding agenda of dooming Akufo-Addo's chances at the presidency.

And they have made no secret of this throughout the party's rather elaborate presidential primaries, when they brazenly flaunted their supposedly secret ballot before visibly flabbergasted media reporters and other operatives.

The vote-of-no-confidence on the administrative competence of Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong clearly regards the fact of whether these two political lovebirds can secure a credible and/or convincing victory for both Nana Akufo-Addo and the New Patriotic Party as a whole. And on the latter score, it is quite obvious that these Kyerematen and Mpiani shills cannot. And on the latter count, too, Mr. Pratt has absolutely no right, whatsoever, to presume to either dictate or second-guess what the most logical choice of party executives ought to be. The party has to quickly regroup and move on, because Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong have demonstrated beyond any iota of doubt that they cannot be trusted to deliver.

The question of where the New Patriotic Party goes, in the aftermath of the departure of Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong, had better be left to the most relevant and appropriate party stalwarts and operatives. It is the internal affairs of the NPP, and one that is not open to the capricious machinations of outsiders like Mr. Pratt.

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