By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 28, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The New Patriotic Party’s leadership continues to have quite a difficult time in warding off the patently unsavory stigma of being invidiously tagged as an Akan party. Such apparently successful tagging is perhaps the single greatest achievement of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress (NDC), which is itself heavily dominated by Anlo-Ewes who disproportionately hold the lion’s share of cabinet appointments.

The NDC operatives have been very successful at using ethnicity to impugn and malign the integrity of the operatives of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), largely because when it comes to barnstorming the North, for some bizarre reason that is best known to themselves, the NPP leaders apparently prefer to play this lopsided and inescapably regressive game of defensiveness, rather than laying out a comprehensive agenda for the massive and rapid development of the North, in particular, and the nation at large.

It therefore came as absolutely no surprise to me at all, albeit very disappointing, when during a recent tour of the Tano-South Constituency, in the Brong-Ahafo Region, the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, defensively reminded some members of the settler, or zongo, communities in the area that the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition had been seminally chock-full of northern-descended leaders and politicians, including Messrs. Jato Kaleo, Abaayifa Karbo, Yakubu Tali, B. K. Adama, Imoro Salifu and C. K. Tedam, among a host of others.

Such handy lessons in Ghana’s anticolonial and postcolonial history is all well and good, except that it does not go far enough in effectively whipping up support for the NPP in this heavily NDC-dominated part of the country. It was, nonetheless, quite apt for Nana Akufo-Addo to highlight the fact that in the contemporary era, astute and distinguished northerners like Messrs. Aliu Mahama, late, and Mahamudu Bawumia have played a significant role in the functional agenda of both the New Patriotic Party and the nation at large (See “This Year, Try Me Too – Akufo-Addo To Ghanaians” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/22/16).

The preceding notwithstanding, the centerpiece of his electioneering campaign tour ought to have focused on development projects and other progressive initiatives undertaken by leaders of the United Party – or UP – Tradition, namely, the short-lived but healthily liberalist rural development-oriented Busia-led Progress Party (PP) and the Agyekum-Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party. Nana Akufo-Addo could then have drawn a comparative development balance sheet with the National Democratic Congress and then informed eligible and potential voters in the region why they needed to overwhelmingly commit their ballots, confidence and trust to an Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party government.

In other words, the NPP operatives need to be staunchly focused on their Tradition’s governance track-record, both in terms of demonstrable material development or quality-of-life improvement policies successfully executed by Prime Minister K. A. Busia and President John Agyekum-Kufuor, rather than inordinately dwelling on the gross administrative incompetence of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress. Indeed, as I have been adumbrating time and again, the NPP leaders ought to deeply get involved in community projects, both rural and urban, as a far more effective and productive means of showcasing what they can do for the people if they are afforded the mandate to govern.

The recent donation of some 500 desks and chairs by Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, Akufo-Addo’s three-time running-mate, to a school perennially neglected by the National Democratic Congress was one such effective electioneering campaign strategy.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs