I am glad that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was able to bring the reprobate and self-serving likes of Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu into realizing the egregious errors of their ways, vis-à-vis the rather scandalous proposals that these entrenched career politicians had mischievously hoped to insert into the Constitution of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), by way of an amendment of the same, during the latest Extraordinary Delegates’ Conference of the party in Kumasi, the Asante regional capital (See “NPP Withdraws Controversial Proposals for Its Constitutional Amendment” Citifmonline.com / Modernghana.com 12/17/17).

Well, actually, I used to think and believe that Mr. Mensah-Bonsu was genuinely up to some good for both the short- and long-term interests of the party until he, literally, led Mr. Dominic Nitiwul, the current Defense Minister and the party’s Member of Parliament for Bimbilla, one of the most politically volatile townships in the country, by the nose to selfishly campaign for Mr. Alban SK Bagbin, one of the longest-serving MPs of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), in Nadowli-Kaleo, in the Upper-East Region, against an NPP candidate challenging Mr. Bagbin in that very constituency. In sum, for Messrs. Mensah-Bonsu and Nitiwul, the bottom-line was cronyism, that is, the jealous protection and preservation of their own parliamentary seats and their plum jobs and fat paychecks and those of their cronies, irrespective of ideology, political suasion or affiliation.

In other words, Messrs. Mensah-Bonsu and Nitiwul are “knaves,” in the Shakespearean sense of the term. They have absolutely no laudable principles besides the protection of their own wallets and those of associates with the capability of assisting them in such abjectly parochial pursuit.

So I was not the least bit surprised to learn that the Parliamentary Majority Leader would put his weight and credibility behind such democratically regressive proposals as having Members of Parliament appoint constituency executives of the party.



What this obviously means, if it had been successfully adopted, is that NPP-MPs would have been facilely conferred with the sort of lifelong dynastic or monarchical mandate of the kind that President Kwame Nkrumah conferred on himself on the eve of his auspicious overthrow in 1965.

I suppose it is quite legitimate and apt to observe that our progressive and robust democratic culture and all, Ghanaian leaders, by and large, are incorrigibly and pathologically doomed to be governed by the dictatorial tendencies which we have been fiercely fighting to consign to the past for some six decades now. I mean, you would have thought that such a morbidly backward proposal would be coming from a delegates’ conference of the Rawlings-minted main opposition National Democratic Congress. As I have always noted, ad nauseam, the name of the “National Democratic Congress” has always eerily reminded me of the ironic name of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Interesting to have to bring this up, but it was only yesterday that my 12-year-old son and namesake, Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, III, asked me whether I thought Ghana was politically and practically a lost cause.

This, I presume, was precisely because although my son had been watching me sit up countless nights at my laptop writing about Ghanaian politics but adamantly refusing to partake of the same on the proverbial Ground Zero. Well, I took a deep breath and measuredly and, wistfully, replied: “Not as long as Akufo-Addo rules the roost.”