By Dr. Michael J.K. Bokor
Thursday, May 29, 2014
The NPP’s National Youth Organizer (Sammy Awuku) was reported on Tuesday as urging the NPP leaders and followers to “stop breaking the hearts of Ghanaians”.
According to him, the NPP is a government in waiting and “Ghanaians are looking up to us to restore hope and redeem them from the shackle of poverty they have been plunged in by the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC)”.
(See: http://www.myjoyonline.com/politics/2014/May-27th/lets-stop-breaking-the-hearts-of-ghanaians-sammy-awuku-to-npp.php)
Although the motivation for Sammy Awuku’s utterance was the dog-eat-dog phenomenon now threatening unity in the party, he took his audacity too far; and I want to bring him back to his station and caution him not to mistake high hopes for reality. It is a figment of his own fevered imagination that is deceiving him to think that way.
The truth is that it is not the NPP that is breaking the hearts of Ghanaians but; it is rather Ghanaians who are breaking the hearts of the NPP’s leaders and followers.
What happened at Elections 2008 and 2012 showed that Ghanaians knew what they were looking for and went for it. They broke the hearts of the NPP members; not so?
The only time that we can agree that the NPP broke the hearts of Ghanaians was when it presented a Presidential candidate who won’t win the elections because the electorate knew who and what he was; and the ill-considered decision of that defeated candidate to contest the results at the Supreme Court, holding Ghanaians hostage for 8 months in 2013.
The truth told the petitioners and the entire lot of the NPP membership by the Supreme Court broke their hearts and sent Akufo-Addo on a so-called soul-searching vacation to heal that wound. Regrettably, he didn’t wait for that wound to heal and has bounced back to begin doing things that will turn that wound into a gangrene.
The goings-on in the NPP that Sammy Awuku has cited as the substance for his utterances indicate that there is nothing new to come from the NPP. It is the same stale story that they are weaving to tell Ghanaians at Election 2016. How do they hope to break hearts with such a worn-out story?
I have insisted all this while that until Akufo-Addo proves that he has learnt anything new with which to make the difference between him and the incumbent, no amount of arm-twisting or rabble-rousing will save him from another electoral defeat; that is, if even he is able to outdo Alan Kyerematen at the party’s December primaries.
From what is unfolding, his insistence on going to the polls again (when he will be 72 years old and considered as a spent horse for the race) seems to be more of a problem for the NPP than the NDC or any of the mushroom parties. We can tell from the daily tearing at throats in the NPP, mudslinging, threats, plain invective, and many others feeding the cycle of internal wranglings that the NPP can’t be the same after the December primaries.
What Sammy Awuku called “vigorous internal debates” on which the NPP thrives is a blatant lie. What is happening in the party has nothing to do with debates. It has much to do with personal attacks and undermining of Kyerematen by the Akufo-Addo camp or vice versa. This kind of “do-me-I-do-you” local politics magnifies at the national level as unproductive “rogue politics”, which Ghanaians won’t accept. Heart-breaking is inevitable
The daily utterances from either camp is devoid of anything worth calling “debate” but is nourished by plain verbal attacks. None seems to be tolerating the other just because the Akufo-Addo camp is particularly bent on browbeating Kyerematen out of contention. He has dug in and will not despair because he knows what he has up his sleeves.
Although Dr. Konadu Apraku is not much in the fray, we know that he is also doing his own thing on the quiet. When push comes to shove, he will be more likely to go along with Kyerematen than with Akufo-Addo. We already know how the NPP’s Sanhedrin has attempted cowing him into submission just because he took the fight to Akufo-Addo.
Other interested aspirants are also doing things underground without participating in the useless wordy warfare, hoping to emerge when the filing of nominations begins on June 6.
In the meantime, no one in the NPP should deceive himself/herself that Ghanaians see the NPP as any saviour or that what the NPP members do or fail to do can break their hearts. The Mahama-led administration is finding the going really tough, but it doesn’t mean that Ghanaians have any hope that the NPP will redeem them. They knew why they rejected Akufo-Addo twice and can do so when given the occasion.
I am glad that the party’s leaders have recognized that there are “loose talkers” in the party to be brought to book: (http://www.myjoyonline.com/politics/2014/May-29th/npp-to-sanction-loose-talkers.php)
Loose talk is the fulcrum for “rogue” politics; but I wonder how a party of loose talkers can ever sanction any loose talker in it. How will they do their “rogue” politics, then?
I shall return…
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