By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 5, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I don’t know that his being a wheelchair-bound person and the first “physically challenged” candidate to successfully win the presidential nomination of any political party in Ghana is very much of a big deal, as Mr. Ben Ephson, the National Democratic Congress-sponsored editor-publisher of the Daily Dispatch would have Ghanaians believe (See “Greenstreet Can Push 2016 Polls into Runoff – Ephson” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/31/16). The fact of the matter is that Mr. Ivor Greenstreet is a Fante Cultural Mulatto of remarkable privilege. His biography highlights the fact that both of his parents are faculty members of the University of Ghana. Mr. Greenstreet himself holds a postgraduate law degree and has been the owner of several business enterprises, including an Accra nightclub.

So in a quite significant sense, the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) is not of the same class or lowly economic and educational background as most of the members of the Kumasi branch of the Ghana Society for the Crippled that I had the opportunity of raising funds for, as leader of the Drama Troupe of the National Youth Organizing Commission (NYOC), presently the National Youth Council (NYC), in the early 1980s. Back then, the group was led by a portly wheelchair-bound clerical employee of the Kumasi City Council (KCC), now called the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA), by the name of Mr. Atakora. I suspect Mr. Atakora, who made his residence at Abrepo-Junction, was a native of Asante-Mampong.

It is also not clear why Mr. Ephson thinks that it would be any much of a big deal for Mr. Greenstreet to cause the epic rematch between President John Dramani Mahama and Nana Akufo-Addo to veer into a runoff or second round of voting. That would neither be the first nor second time in Ghana’s postcolonial history or even that of the country’s Fourth Republic. It would really not need any much of an effort to bring this about. The general rule has been that anytime more than two major political parties contest in a presidential election, there is bound to be a runoff, as was witnessed in 2008 in the highly charged contest between then-Candidate John Evans Atta-Mills and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

It also does not necessarily follow that his ability to clinching 64-percent of the rump-CPP delegate votes automatically translates into making an identical impact on the national political landscape. For starters, the rump-CPP delegates who offered Mr. Greenstreet some 1,288 votes, out of a valid total of 1,992, are not a scientifically representative sampling of the rump-CPP voters themselves. But even more significantly, whether Mr. Greenstreet would be capable of obtaining a lion’s share of the 7-percent total that Mr. Ephson expects all the minority parties to collectively clinch remains to be seen. At the end of the day, what matters most is not the fact of whether Election 2016 goes into a runoff, but rather whether the most progressive and imaginative political party gets offered the mandate to steer the country’s affairs for the next four years.

I really don’t see any politician who makes the noetic decision of pairing up with the pathologically megalomaniacal Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings going very far either in the 2016 presidential election or the political future of the country. Already, the prime loser of the most recent rump-CPP presidential primary, Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, has virulently accused Mr. Greenstreet, the party’s former General-Secretary, of having bought most of his delegate votes for amounts ranging from GHC 200 and 500. As I observed in a previous column not quite a while back, this is a very serious charge that has the potentiality of remarkably denting the image and reputation of both Mr. Greenstreet and the rump-CPP as a whole.

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