By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

He has spent a considerable amount of time explaining to all who would listen, precisely why Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo goofed big-time when in 2008, the presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) selected the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) as his running-mate, and then, again, during the 2012 presidential election season.

And so it comes as very refreshing that Mr. Paul Collins Appiah-Ofori should be calling for Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia to be selected as the NPP presidential candidate - or flagbearer - for Election 2016, in the highly unlikely event of the Supreme Court ruling on the Akufo-Addo petition going in favor of the latter's political opponent and the 69-year-old former Justice Minister deciding not to contest the presidency for the third consecutive time (See "Bawumia Must Be Made NPP Flagbearer - Appiah-Ofori" Ghanaweb.com 5/24/13).

For Mr. Appiah-Ofori, the fact that almost each and every one of his siblings and extended family relatives is a staunch member and/or operative of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) effectively disqualified Dr. Bawumia from being selected to partner Nana Akufo-Addo on the NPP presidential ticket. For the recently retired Member of Parliament for the Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa Constituency, of the Central Region, the apparent failure of the former African Development Bank's Resident Economist in Harare, Zimbabwe, to massively facilitate the crossover of his own blood relatives, offered a striking cautionary signal of the fact of Dr. Bawumia direly lacking the winsome skills of a major political operative.

And, indeed, for quite a while, Mr. Appiah-Ofori appeared to have the proverbial crowd in his corner. And, indeed, he may well have been a tad accurate in his quite introspective assessment. For, after all, has politics not been often said to be a game of numbers?

I, for one, however, in 2008, saw the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia presidential ticket flop squarely in terms of the rancorous infighting that convulsively wracked the party. I also remember critically observing that the damnable extent of the abject level of indiscipline that had epileptically taken grips of the NPP would have definitely and readily guaranteed the epic failure of its flagbearer to cinch a victory even if Nana Akufo-Addo had been partnered by the historio-mythical Jesus Christ of Bethlehem and Nazareth.

To be certain, what makes Dr. Bawumia a giant and dominant figure on the Fourth Republican Ghanaian political landscape is the unique fact of him being a veritable pioneer, in the quite laudable sense that he is about the only significant adult member of his family to break ideological ranks by boldly and unabashedly deciding to truck with the staunch adherents of the Danquah-Dombo-Busia tradition of seminal postcolonial Ghanaian democrats. And in the evergreen words of Mr. Thomas Paine, the legendary American political philosopher and thinker, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia is no summer soldier or fair-weather kith. He has resolutely shunned the proverbial primrose path by fighting the hard way to earn his keep, as it were.

At any rate, long before the ongoing Akufo-Addo/NPP petition hearings, the Oxbridge- and Simon Fraser-schooled Akufo-Addo running-mate had distinguished himself by chairing the Bank of Ghana committee of experts that reinvested value into the virtual shinplaster that was Ghana's monetary currency, the CEDI, under the 20-year extortionate political domination of Ghanaian political culture by the pseudo-socialist and populist regime of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, the godfather and founding patriarch of the so-called National Democratic Congress.

In essence, the rare gem that is Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has always been latent in the activities and the generally refined deportment of the man. It was only a matter of time before political conservatives like Monsieur Appiah-Ofori caught on to the same.

_____________________________________________________
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
###