By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 27, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Whoever put into the heads, let alone the minds, of National Democratic Congress (NDC) apparatchiks like Mr. Abraham Amaliba that his veritable terrorist organization is the template against which the viability of all the other political parties in the country is to be measured, did Ghanaians great dishonor (See “Divisive Akufo-Addo Cannot Govern Ghana – Amaliba” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/8/15). Truth be told: The National Democratic Congress remains in power today because the leaders of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), while relatively far more progressive and talented than their National Democratic Congress counterparts, have yet to meaningfully learn to constructively subsume their individual political ambitions behind the collective long-term interests of both their constituents and those of the nation at large.

In 2007, for instance, the leaders in charge of the party’s decision-making apparatuses ought to have drastically restricted the number of candidates permitted to vie for the party’s presidential nomination in the lead-up to Election 2008. It was this woeful lack of discipline, falsely paraded as the liberalist Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition that precipitated the kind of internecine conflict in which the party’s leadership currently finds itself. On the preceding count, the NDC’s Mr. Abraham Amaliba is quite accurate to recognize the fact of the existence of a nihilistic element of vindictiveness on the part of some of the leaders of the New Patriotic Party. But, needless to say, Mr. Amaliba is grossly mistaken to squarely place the blame at the feet of the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the party. The fact that Nana Akufo-Addo has been consecutively and overwhelmingly elected three times by party delegates to champion the cause of the NPP, with steadily increasing percentages of approval at every turn, ought to more than eloquently inform the so-called National Democratic Congress’ Communications Team Member that Akufo-Addo may very well be guilty of every negative tag in the proverbial book except “divisiveness.”

I have already detailed, ad nauseam, the number of times that the Kufuor-Kyerematen faction of the party epically and glaringly betrayed Mr. Kufuor’s former Attorney-General and Justice Minister and do not intend to belabor the issue here again. I would, however, cite that one at once most striking and scandalous example of the omission of the name of Nana Akufo-Addo from the former President’s National Merit Honors Award, when even the names of putative arch-political opponents and downright enemies like Messrs. John Evans Atta-Mills, presently deceased, John Dramani Mahama and Kojo Tsikata, the man widely believed to have orchestrated the brutal abduction and cold-blooded Mafia-style execution of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges, had their names in bold print and widely publicized in the national media. But for his preemptive protest, the name of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings may well have been the first on the list.

It would take public haranguing from Prof. Mike Oquaye for President Kufuor and his world-infamous Chief-of-Staff and clansman, Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani to publish Akufo-Addo’s name on the aforementioned list. And when his name finally appeared on the list, it was disdainfully categorized among the third-class of national-merit honors awardees. Once again, Prof. Oquaye had to volley several salvos at the leaders of the Atwima Mafia in order to get the 2008 NPP flagbearer brought up into the proper category. By this time, massive electoral damage had already been done. In sum, President Kufuor’s intransigent disapproval of Nana Akufo-Addo had spilled into the public arena. This is precisely why I did not take kindly to a Trokosi nationalist’s recent characterization of Nana Akufo-Addo’s 2008 presidential campaign as one that had the full-backing of President Kufuor, who also supposedly released a lot of capital and human resources to boost up the same. You know me already: I told Mr. Trokosi to go f… his mama!
Then also, I vividly recall commenting that if I were Ghana’s former Foreign Minister, I would have skipped the damn self-patting ceremony and instead delegated one of my aides to receive it on my behalf. Well, true to his eudemonious spirit of conciliation and harmony, Akufo-Addo would personally attend this ceremonial orgy in order to graciously receive his Oquaye-lobbied award from a shamelessly polite President Kufuor. Recently, Mr. Abdul Malik Kweku Baako, the editor-publisher of the New Crusading Guide, was widely reported to have described Nana Akufo-Addo as the most undeservedly “maligned” and “bastardized” politician in Fourth-Republican Ghana. Predictably, the same rented Trokosi nationalist hack wrote and published an article in which the godforsaken SOB faulted Nana Akufo-Addo for being the architect of his own betrayal by the key operatives of the Atwima Mafia. It is quite clear that Mr. Amaliba is of the same pathologically cynical mindset.

As a party in power, the New Patriotic Party more than amply demonstrated that it was the party to emulate, and not merely the most formidable political alternative to a decidedly obsolete and irredeemably primitive juggernaut like the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress. I would, however, leave it to the judgment of those who studiously witnessed Nana Aklufo-Addo vigorously campaign for President John Agyekum-Kufuor in the lead-up to elections 2000 and 2004 to decide, whether, indeed, Nana Akufo-Addo was reciprocally dealt the same good turn that he is widely acclaimed to have dealt my dear Uncle Kofi Diawuo.