The BOOM that doesn’t favour Nana Konadu

(Part I)

By Dr. Michael J.K. Bokor

E-mail: mjbokor@yahoo.com

June 6, 2011

The much-anticipated June 4 Boom event has come to pass without its registering anything significantly new on the political landscape. It is the same old story that has been doing the rounds as part of the Rawlings agenda for mischief in Ghana politics.

Rawlings’ stentorian whining emerged as the most significant landmark of the Kumasi event. As was to be expected, Rawlings used the occasion to make wild allegations at everybody he considers as an enemy.

Former President Kufuor and functionaries of his government came under attack; President Mills and his government members were not spared either. Others were also upbraided as part of Rawlings’ agenda of discrediting anybody he considers as an impediment to his political interests. Now, the calumny seems to be directed at those he considers as obstacles to his wife’s ambition to be Ghana’s President.

We will consider Rawlings’ excoriation of all those “enemies” as part of the strategies that he and his wife have devised to do battle as the NDC’s delegates prepare for their Sunyani congress to elect the party’s Presidential Candidate.

His utterances in Kumasi on the occasion might be seen on the surface as denigrating those he had verbally attacked; but that can’t be the case. On the contrary, the event portrays the high degree of desperation that has gripped the Rawlings camp as far as their apprehensions about the outcome of the upcoming congress are concerned.

One instance, which encapsulates this high degree of desperation, is captured in Rawlings’ threat that the inevitable will happen “if Mills refuses to accept the will of the people on July 8”—an apparent reference to the outcome of the Sunyani congress. I laugh Rawlings to scorn on this score and urge him to immediately begin preparing to carry out that “eventuality” (whatever it may mean to him) because President Mills will definitely be endorsed by the party’s delegates to contest the 2012 Presidential elections.

I will explain later my reasons for being so brazen and why I have thrown this challenge to Rawlings; but first, let me take the wind out of Rawlings’ sail to tell him what I perceive as the line of action for him and his wife (and hangers-on being indoctrinated to cause mischief) to take as the “inevitable” he hinted at.

That “inevitable” is only one of two things: either (i) he and his wife leave the NDC to form their own political party in protest; or (ii) remain in the NDC to foment trouble and be dealt with sternly. Either way, their chances of redeeming themselves are dim. Let me hazard this guess in more detail.

Leaving the NDC to Form a New Political Party

This act of desperation may not be beyond the Rawlingses, if we want to infer from the “okro-mouth” that Ekwow Spio-Garbrah had become on this issue. They will have an uphill task making this party viable enough to outdo whatever will be left of the NDC under President Mills’ government or the NPP. Who will follow them except those yet to know them in their true elements?

The majority of people who know them for what cunning and vindictive characters they are will distance themselves from such a party. And they are more than those in their camp fomenting trouble left and right. Such a party will be doomed at birth.

Hanging on in the NDC and Fomenting Trouble

Any decision they make to lick their wounds and remain in the NDC will come with conditions that they have to fulfill or suffer the consequences. Once they lose the fight at the Sunyani congress but choose to remain in the party, they shouldn’t be given any quarter to foment trouble. This where the full force of the laws of the land must be brought down to bear heavily on them.

For Rawlings particularly, he will have to be dealt with in a manner that will exorcize him once and for all. President Mills may be “soft” or “slow-to-act” but under such a circumstance, nothing should prevent him from invoking all the necessary powers at his disposal to clip Rawlings’ wings.

If he does so, he will have maximum support from both the NDC circles and the entire length and breadth of the country. It will be very much paradoxical that Rawlings should be so treated and contained in every way possible by his own party-in-government.

Former President Kufuor couldn’t do it and Mills hasn’t been able to do so to date; but if the Sunyani congress will be the catalyst for that action, it should be done expeditiously. That will be the time to prove to him that he is no more “Ghanaian” than the more than 23 million citizens of the land whom he has tyrannized all these years.

Now, let me explain why I am optimistic of victory for President Mills at the Sunyani congress. Many factors favour him although the Rawlingses have mounted rooftops to portray him as a flop. The party’s delegates don’t harbour against President Mills the venomous sentiments that the Rawlingses and their followers blindly have stored in their hulk and are spitting about indiscriminately to discredit him.

These delegates know that administering Ghana goes beyond merely working for the sustenance of the NDC or hounding political opponents. Does a strong NDC translate into an improvement in their living conditions? Or should they feel Nana Konadu’s magnanimity only when she becomes the party’s flagbearer or the President of Ghana?

The NDC functionaries can’t say that in the reign of Rawlings, they had more attention or material gains than they may be complaining about under the Mills-led government. Perhaps, those among them who have unwittingly played themselves into the hands of the Rawlingses to be manipulated for their voices and votes at Sunyani are those who can’t see things beyond their noses to know that they are only being used by cunning people to achieve their own political ambitions. I hope that those who are willing to separate the grain from the chaff will see things in their proper perspective to know which line to toe so as not to regret later.

Continued in the next installment…