By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Oct. 24, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I don’t know what this so-called Save NPP Now! pressure group is about. What is quite obvious, though, is the fact that the Baah Acheamfuor group is about anything but the salvation and cohesion of the country’s largest political party (See “We’ll Resist Any Attempts to Divide NPP – Group” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/24/15). The so-called communications director of the group claims that the decision by the National Executive Committee of the New Patriotic Party to indefinitely suspend Chairman Paul Afoko for gross administrative incompetence, while apparently leaving the party’s General-Secretary, Mr. Kwabena Agyepong, unscathed smacks of ethnic chauvinism or, in mainstream Ghanaian parlance, tribalism.

Well, maybe it might be of some interest to Mr. Acheamfuor and his Save NPP Now! Abongo Boys to learn that there is another news report circulating on the Internet, as of this writing, which alleges that the NPP-NEC’s decision to indefinitely suspend Mr. Afoko may be primarily linked to the Bolgatanga, Upper-East, native’s flagrantly public attempt to cop an alibi for his younger brother, Mr. Gregory Afoko, vis-à-vis the latter’s forensically established involvement in the brutal acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama who, until his savage mauling, was the Upper-East’s regional chairman of the New Patriotic Party. What this means is that if Mr. Acheamfuor strongly believes that Mr. Kwabena Agyepong had any hand in the brutal murder of Mr. Mahama, then, of course, absolutely nothing prevents the Save NPP Now! leader from taking up the matter with the leadership of the party whose good fortune his group and Mr. Acheamfuor claim to be jealously guarding.
This is funny, but it clearly looks as if Mr. Acheamfuor has been doing as much by way of cynically subjecting the New Patriotic Party to national ridicule, as much as he has purportedly been doing to ensure that the party emerges victorious in the 2016 general election. For instance, Mr. Acheamfuor has, reportedly, vaunted about having been the party operative who reported to the police that Mr. Freddie Blay, the NPP’s First National Vice-Chairman, had criminally misappropriated some funds belonging to the party. We are also told that the party’s Constitution necessitated that Mr. Acheamfuor’s first port of plaint, or grievance, ought to have been the National Executive Committee, or some such cardinal party governance establishment. And so maybe the next reprobate and devious nihilist to be put on the chopping block by both the NPP-NEC and the party’s Disciplinary Committee ought to be the communications wonk of Save NPP Now!

I also have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Mr. Acheamfuor may be quite right in his assessment of some highly placed party operatives being in it for their own exclusive interests and benefits. But what I equally have good reason to question is why, if Mr. Acheamfuor is so concerned about the good fortune of the New Patriotic Party, he would doggedly persist in impugning the credibility of the operatives of the highest organs of the party. The young man obviously has an agenda that is very different from that/those of the men and women constitutionally mandated to steer the affairs of the party. Which leaves me wondering whether the Save NPP Now! group has not actually been hired and paid by some inveterate detractors of the NPP to do precisely the opposite of what Mr. Acheamfuor claims to be the mission of his so-called Save NPP Now! front organization – that is, the salvific empowerment of the New Patriotic Party.

We need to also highlight the fact that his past rump-Convention People’s Party affiliation notwithstanding, Mr. Blay has since joining the New Patriotic Party done some yeomanly heavy-lifting work for the party which readily puts the man head-and-shoulders above his determined internal detractors and the credibility of the latter and the trustworthiness of these so-called NPP Indigenes into serious question. At the end of the day, though, what is really at stake here is not a superficial contest of personalities and/or ethnicities and sub-ethnicities, but a critical question of ideological principles and political discipline. These are a few of the qualities I understand the leaders of the NPP-NEC to have found to be grievously and woefully wanting in Chairman Afoko.