By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
He claims to have done wonders as Greater-Accra Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), but Sammy Crabbe is not telling his audience precisely what it is that he has done for the citizens and inhabitants of our nation's capital that makes him a better candidate for the job than the substantive National Chairman of the NPP (See "Crabbe: NPP Doesn't Need an 'Arm-Chair Chairman'" Radioxyzonline.com /Ghanaweb.com 10/5/13).
He also vacuously claims to have run for the main opposition party's National Chairmanship in 2010, without telling us precisely how that poll went down with the electorate or the party members who elected his arch-rival over him for the job. "I think that's where I want to be, because from there you can influence the whole thing, [you can] engineer systems. There are so many things [that] you can really do... that the authority of the party chairmanship is required."
It is, of course, one thing to dream about wielding the most powerful party job, short of the presidential candidacy and/or the presidency; and also radically quite another to actually possess and/or claim to have what it takes to perform creditably as the National Chairman of Ghana's largest political party. We know from the percentage of votes afforded NPP parliamentarians by the Ghanaian electorate in Election 2012, that the latter party has a remarkably greater number of committed backers than the ethnic-minority dominated ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC).
What Mr. Crabbe ought to be doing presently, if he really wants Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey's job, is to be explaining to his constituents and the membership of the party, as a whole, precisely why he believes his campaign goods were roundly rejected in 2012; and why Mr. Crabbe thinks it would be any different this time around. In other words, Mr. Crabbe needs a palpable strategy and a pragmatic agenda that the people he hopes to convince to help him unseat his redoubtable political arch-rival can relate to.
And so far, the man does not appear to be credibly up to the task. If, indeed, he thinks that calling Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey such cynical names as an "arm-chair chairman" would put him right over the top of his arch-rival, then Mr. Crabbe must be living in a fool's paradise. Here again, Mr. Crabbe appears to be eerily and dauntingly living as such - that is, in a fool's paradise!
The former Greater-Accra Chairman of the New Patriotic Party also quizzically reminds me of one of the 17 NPP presidential candidates for the 2007 primaries, who gifted the party with a club house in oblique hopes of clinching the party's nomination, hands down, in the specious name of selfless magnanimity and patriotism. The gift itself, to be certain, was rather noble. It was, however, the apparently expedient timing of the gift, and the latter's implicitly facile insult to the intelligence of the party's electors, that patently did in the candidacy of Mr. Hackman Owusu-Agyemang.
And so when Mr. Sammy Crabbe "macho-cratically" offers to foot the entire bill, solo, for the next NPP National Congress, it is not clear just how he wants this most "kindly gesture" to be perceived, since he is also eagerly vying for the topmost administrative job in the party. You see, you cannot referee your own game and hope to clinch a credible victory from the same. And this is precisely why I strongly believe that Mr. Crabbe is apt to, once again, massively fall by the wayside, this second time around. If he really wants to play the equally laudable, and noble, role of a party bankroller, or financier, then he had better effectively stay out of the running. In sum, Mr. Crabbe may wisely ought to become a kingmaker, but not a king and kingmaker at the same time. That kind of political obscenity belongs to another time and era altogether.
Indeed, were Mr. Crabbe as smart as he would have Ghanaians believe, he would have both recognized and appreciated the preceding fact well beforehand.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Oct. 5, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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