By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
March 24, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
Let’s put this on record – the suspended Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr. Paul A. Afoko, has never voted for Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, at least since the December 2007 NPP congressional ruckus on the sprawling campus of the University of Ghana, when some supporters of Nana Akufo-Addo were alleged to have concussed the skull of the well-known and intransigently avowed Kufuor-Kyerematen partisan. The target of assault had been accused of inducing committed Akufo-Addo congressional delegates with monetary bribes on the congressional floor.
And so it comes as nothing short of the criminally absurd for Mr. Afoko to be smugly pretending as if the public announcement of his intention not to vote for the 2016 NPP presidential candidate means anything besides what most of us have already known for quite a considerable while now (See “I Won’t Vote for Akufo-Addo – Afoko” Daily Guide / Modernghana.com 3/24/16). Indeed, it is like hearing Messrs. Richard W. Anane and Kwadwo Mpiani claiming to be staunch Akufo-Addo partisans. Nothing could be more oxymoronic.
The fact of the matter is that even during the most recent New Patriotic Party’s congressional primaries, in the wake of his election as NPP National Chairman, Mr. Afoko made absolutely no secret of his pet aversion for Ghana’s former’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, when he and Mr. Kwabena Agyei Agyepong, the party’s suspended General-Secretary, impudently flaunted their ballot papers before a bevy of media operatives for the whole world to see and know that the electoral success of Nana Akufo-Addo was the last thing on their minds.
It is also very annoying to hear Mr. Afoko claim to have put together a winsome strategy for the 2016 electioneering campaign of Nana Akufo-Addo, as if having Mr. Agyepong tear down the portraits of the 2016 NPP Presidential Candidate at party headquarters was one such winsome strategy. I shall shortly come to that part of the Afoko-Agyepong attempt to systematically scuttle the 2016 Akufo-Addo electioneering campaign, but for now suffice it to say, at least in passing, to those seeking to have a gag order placed on the public utterances of the suspended NPP Chairman that such an order would only inexpediently postpone the dastardly venting of the immitigable ill-will that Mr. Afoko indisputably harbors for Akufo-Addo and the fortunes of the party at large.
In essence, this is not the most constructive and effective method of dealing with the man whose grossly irresponsible leadership incapacity may well have culminated in the midnight acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, the former Upper-East Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party by Mr. Gregory Afoko, the younger brother of the indefinitely suspended and estranged Chairman of the NPP. Indeed, the best way to tackle him is to let Mr. Afoko talk himself hoarse and silly to the vindication of the decision by the members of the NPP’s National Executive Committee (NPP-NEC) to indefinitely suspend perhaps the most politically reprehensible and nihilistic personality to have ever been elected party chairman.
Going back to court, it is quite certain that Mr. Afoko has provided more than enough munitions for his respondents to successfully use against him and thus smoothly prepare the way to permanently ease him out of the party. He has preemptively defeated himself in both the largely moral court of public opinion as well as the legitimately constituted court of judicature. He has also more than amply demonstrated that he woefully lacks the sort of human relations, or people, skills needed to effectively steer the affairs of the country’s biggest and most accomplished and democratic political party.
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