By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
May 8, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

To the best of my knowledge, the only living leaders of any political party in Fourth-Republican Ghana who murdered as a means of gaining power and keeping it are Messrs. Jerry John Rawlings and John Dramani Mahama. And both men, of course, belong to the now-ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC). And so it comes as immitigably preposterous to hear NDC National Organizer Mr. Kofi Adams self-righteously assert that "Nana Addo's only ambition is to win power; so if it means killing everyone to be[come] president over dead bodies, he would do it" (See "Akufo-Addo Ambitious But Visionless - Kofi Adams" Adomonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/8/15).

Mr. Adams is also being mischievously simplistic when he deliberately ignores both the remote and immediate causes of the raucous and rancorous dissensions raging through Ghana's main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). Which, of course, is not to totally exonerate Nana Akufo-Addo from the imperative need of becoming more resolute in the manner in which he chooses to deal with incorrigible party bottlenecks like General-Secretary Kwabena Agyei Agyepong. I also don't know what Mr. Adams means when he smugly asserts that the 2016 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party is "full of ambition but without vision."

Maybe Mr. Adams is in a position to explain precisely what "vision" his boss, President John Dramani Mahama, has brought to bear on even a simple and basic problem like the country's perennially erratic energy supply system. It is also rather silly for Mr. Adams to scornfully impugn the leadership credibility of both Nana Akufo-Addo and Mr. Freddie Blay, the First National Vice-Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, because the latter had decided to convene an emergency meeting of the National Steering Committee of the party to discuss the criteria for vetting parliamentary candidates for the party's upcoming parliamentary primaries while Chairman Paul Afoko was out of the country for undisclosed reasons.

First of all, we are not told that Mr. Afoko left the shores of Ghana in order to attend pressing party affairs. As well, we don't know just why Mr. Afoko chose this particularly critical moment on the party's calendar to leave or stay out of the country. But even more significant ought to be emphasized the fact that while all the NPP executive operatives are important to the smooth and efficient running of the party's affairs, nonetheless, no single individual party executive, including Nana Akufo-Addo, of course, is bigger or more important than the party itself. And would Mr. Adams, the NDC National Organizer, consent to the postponement of the pre-scheduled date for Election 2016 because Mr. Kofi Portuphy, the National Democratic Congress' National Chairman, who also greedily doubles as the National Coordinator of the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO), has some personal business to attend to on that particular date?

You see, I have told readers once or twice before that Mr. Adams is a young man with a vaulting ambition but who does not have what it takes both intellectually and professionally to run any serious political organization in the country. And then to have this pathetic borderline case of a mentally retarded urchin presume to impugn the caliber and leadership integrity of Nana Akufo-Addo, the man who has contributed nearly more than any living Ghanaian leader to media freedom, and free speech as well, in the country. I will tackle this issue more fully in a later column, but just the other day President Mahama reportedly stooped so desperately low as to attempt to exchange verbal fisticuffs with entertainment industry stars like Ms. Yvonne Nelson, on the patently unarguable question of whether these bona fide citizens of Ghana also have a right to publicly protest the politically damning canker of Dumsor.

It curiously appears that Mr. Mahama equates his ability to crudely and rudely silence some of his most caustic Dumsor critics with actually solving the seemingly intractable problem of Dumsor itself. And this is what Mr. Adams would have Ghanaians envisage to be the nonesuch "visionary" leadership of the Mahama-led rag-tag government of the National Democratic Congress? God save us from the reprobate scumbags that are the likes of Mr. Adams and his kleptocratic paymasters.

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