Whose Sycophant Is Sammy Crabbe, Anyway?

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

Garden City, New York

Dec. 9, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I was amused in no small way to learn from Mr. Anthony Karbo, the Deputy Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), that Mr. Sammy Crabbe actually campaigned on the back and reputation of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the NPP, to get himself elected Second-Vice Chairman of the party (See “Akufo-Addo Is Breeding Sycophants In NPP – Crabbe” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/9/15).

This is pretty amusing because 6 years ago, when a point-woman of the London Gang, of which Mr. Crabbe was a key operative, abortively attempted to coopt yours truly into their faction of the NPP, Mr. Crabbe was decidedly no fan of Nana Akufo-Addo’s. It was incontrovertibly clear that Mr. Crabbe was a bona fide lieutenant, or foot-soldier, of the Kufuor-Kyerematen faction of the New Patriotic Party. That faction, of course, also goes by the sobriquet of the Atwima Mafia. The latter’s point-woman in question had actually traveled to Ghana to hobnob with Chief Kufuor, the then scandal-wracked dauphin of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, shortly before I arrived in London to attend my niece’s wedding.

I know this for a fact because the lawyerly lady in question had e-mailed me several pictures that she had joyfully taken with Chief Kufuor. These days such pictures are called “Selfies.” Well, Mr. Crabbe also claims that Nana Akufo-Addo has surrounded himself with “a gang of sycophants who see no evil and hear no evil” about their presumable political hero and ideological icon. The problem here, though, is that Mr. Crabbe and his gang, including Messrs. Paul A. Afoko and Kwabena A. Agyepong, appear to see only evil in Nana Akufo-Addo. Indeed, one would be hard put to point to a single instance of constructive or positive deed done by any of the trio since their congressional election last year that is indicative of the fact of these men’s having doggedly pursued a policy of levelheadedness or objectivity in their capacities as top administrators at the Asylum Down NPP national headquarters.

Indeed, I vividly recall reading several news stories in which these “Three Musketeers” were widely alleged to have openly and unprofessionally displayed the name of the candidate for the 2016 flagbearership of the party whom they intended to cast their ballots for. And, needless to say, nearly every one of the news reports clearly indicated that the name of the favorite candidate on the ballot papers of Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong, in particular, was not that of the candidate who eventually carried the votes of the overwhelming majority of the valid votes cast by the congressional delegates or electors across the country.

Now, the question that all well-meaning and levelheaded Ghanaians ought to be asking – and which, by the way, had been asked by not just a handful of the reporters who covered the NPP presidential primary at the party’s headquarters – regards why these three men had brazenly decided to flaunt their ballot papers in front of the media, when the entire process was supposed to be secret and private. Well, I tend to unabashedly believe that this was their loud, clear and unmistakable signal to Nana Akufo-Addo and his supporters and sympathizers that a new regime was in town that had effectively assumed reins of governance at party headquarters and had absolutely no use for the good fortune of the former New Patriotic Party Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa South.

In short, the Atwima Mafia network was effectively in control. Naturally, having been given the greatest shock of their political careers, even as bitterly opined by a cognitively addled and indescribably flabbergasted Nana Ohene-Ntow, the former New Patriotic Party General-Secretary and the Atwima Mafia Chief Propagandist at the time, the next logical strategy of the Afoko Party Hijackers and Terrorists, was to ensure that party activities would suavely and deliberately grind to a halt, with the medium- and long-term goals being to quickly shove Akufo-Addo, who had decidedly become a nuisance, out of the way, in order to studiously focus their attention and energies on their so-called Agenda 2020.

A central plank of the Atwima Mafia strategy has been to systematically defy, disrespect and discredit all the legitimate and constitutionally sanctioned structures, or bodies, established to both govern and regulate the conduct of party members, officials and administrators. On this score, the attitude and behavior of Messrs. Agyepong and Crabbe have studiously followed the pattern established by the indefinitely suspended Chairman Afoko. Mr. Agyepong has also attempted to slyly and suavely chart a sinuous path of “devious neutrality” that appropriates a deft combination of jujitsu and a low-level war of attrition. It is dangerously chameleonic, and the party’s elders, the National Council, as well as all the other movers-and-shakers with the good fortune of the New Patriotic Party at heart had better take notice and sit up.

Needless to say, Sammy Crabbe cannot fool anybody but himself and those willed, or sworn, to having themselves fooled by this man. And somebody had better let it be known to him that intemperately disrespecting party rules, associates and culture is no laudable sign of constructive criticism, cognitive independence and a winsome and progressive strategy for regaining power come 2016. Rather, it is symptomatic of the well-greased palms of moles hell-bent on criminal self-destruction. And the latter observation is, of course, assuming that the Atwima Mafia Trio has a remarkable interest in the New Patriotic Party beyond installing their preferred candidate on the party’s topmost ticket at all costs.

We also need to revisit the reasons given by Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the Parliamentary Minority Leader, for advising his fellow NPP House colleagues to unilaterally and summarily cut off their regular financial contributions to party headquarters. Mr. Crabbe ought to get this loud and clear: “We prefer sycophants with a united front and a dogged determination to wresting power from the bumbling Mahama Posse, to a politics of personal destruction forged on the altar of ‘objective’ treachery.”

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