Kwabena Nyamekye

It was Tony Blair, who when he was fighting to become leader of the Labour Party in 1994, who said that the party was faced with a stark choice: They can elect him leader as he represented a radical break from the past, or they can choose someone else who the party loves but who represents an unelectable faction. If they chose him, Blair, all well and good. If they chose someone else then Labour was going to spend decades in opposition holding useless press conferences and adopting irrelevant resolutions that no one was going to pay attention to. Labour elected Blair and the rest is history including his stunning victories in Margaret Thatcher’s constituency of Finchley in 1997 and 2001.

Acting Chairman Freddie Blay and his NPP are going down this path at top speed. The recent press conference on the developments at party Headquarters signals the direction that the NPP is heading. Loaded with nonsensical details and adding absolutely nothing to the Party’s chances of winning power next year, frankly one wonders what is happening to the party that just 10 years ago was the envy of Ghanaians with its ground breaking social welfare agenda, its expansion of the economy and its rescue of our finances. If press conferences made an impact on election fortunes the CPP should have been in power ages ago.

Image is important. Crying about your party headquarters being attacked does not help your image. No one will elect you to power just because a shadowy group of persons has ransacked your office. And anyway given the pirates who attacked Afoko and Agyapong after the reshuffle of NPP secretariat staff, given the stoning of party executives, who says the NPP has any issues with violence within its ranks. When Adu Boahen was leader – no violence. Even if there were tensions he managed to suppress them because he was a leader! The Prof was held in high esteem by Ghanaians and thus even if they did not want him as president his esteem impacted on the mood in the party. Same applies to JA Kufuor. Come a new flag bearer and all hell breaks loose. However this is not strange: the threats he made after his second loss in 2012 that if he is not elected leader he will destroy us should have warned all and sundry. He has spent almost 2 years degrading the positions in the party that are vital to sustaining us as an organization in the future. After he has been beaten in 2016 he will leave the scene and leave us to repair our organization – assuming it is possible to do so. The next Chairman and/or General Secretary might be scared to remove the cleaners from the party Headquarters lest someone attack them with knives and file complaints against them. The next party executives will be scared to say anything that their deputies do not like given how the deputies are being used to subvert their bosses today. The next time a candidate for flag bearer says he can’t work with some people the party better take heed. In fact perhaps we should scrap delegates’ conference and just ask the most militant of the candidates running for flag bearer to choose the Chairman, Woman’s Organizer, General Secretary etc.
These are the issues that the party should be debating and resolving. Instead what do we see? Freddie Blay and the NPP crying their hearts out over some unexplained incident. First it was Afoko who was responsible. Then it was NDC members and Afoko. Now it is the government – well cry me a river!!! How did it come to this? How on earth did we go from an organization built on firm principles and ideology to one big toilet with a host of tired men who have taken us to defeat upon defeat, defecating in the toilet without flushing the bowl?

Central region gone. Brong-Ahafo region gone. Even Wenchi constituency (Busia’s hometown!!) gone. Greater Accra gone. Western region gone. Ashanti region down from the high 70s to low 70s. Eastern region under attack. 150 pick-ups, 40 SUVS and 10 salon cars, all used during the 2012 campaign, are missing. Secret bank accounts. Hooting at the General Secretary. Hooting at the Chairman. Our constitution reduced to toilet paper to wipe the faces from the bottoms of those using the party as a toilet.

There are no press conferences to address these issues. But when the party HQ is invaded we see our executives give a long-winding press conference full of gas and wind. No one in Ghana feels sorry us. We have made ourselves unelectable. Look back at how we built ourselves up from the struggles of 1992 to the peak of glory under Kufuor and look at where we are now.

We will be thrashed again in 2016. The party executives will hold another press conference and Ghanaians will say boo frikin hoo. No one is more responsible for your plight than those in charge of affairs who have vetoed the delegates’ votes at Tamale and who are planting confusion that will haunt our great tradition for the decades to come.