If you are a card carrying NPP member, you must be scratching your head in wonderment. To be sure, the elections are not over and Nana Addo may still pull this through. The real danger lies in having CPP and PNC voters switch to the NDC. All things being equal, if only 55% of the PNC cum CPP voters go with the NDC in the run-off, Nana Addo is toast. I bet the Alan Cash supporters are giggling inside the tent. Can you forgive Kufour for screwing up the NPP like he has? Kufour has done to the NPP what he did to Asante Kotoko when he managed the team. Failure! Let no one be fooled, this elections represents a striking indictment of Kufour and his misplaced priorities. It represents a so called leader who will not listen to his own party members let alone the suffering masses in Ghana. He chose his path, found his yes men, and everybody else did not matter. Never mind that he slept soundly at the wheel even as he found time to castigate Ghanaians as lazy yawning drones! Of course, Nana Addo was part of this phalanx, so, I shed no tears for the hives that he endures. But if God smiles on him and yanks him through, he will be well advised to govern from the center and avoid the inanities of Kufour catastrophic misrule. He may want to either call Obama or take notes! The flying 50 cents Kufour, festooned with ornaments to boost his low self-esteem, has placed a momentarily irrevocable burden on the NPP.

My friends, the NPP rode to power, blazing saddles and all, with a lot of goodwill. People were fed up with Rawlings and the equally corrupt regime that he nursed. As soon as the honeymoon wore off, Kufour and his close circle of friends started to implement their chieftaincy and corrupt machinations. Not even NPP insiders could stop this man from following his misplaced and surely backward policies. Kufour ate cake while our people starved and died. How in the world do you build a 60 million presidential palace with a loan from India at a time when kids, stomach filled with tape and guinea worms, study under trees? The good people within the NPP who tried to speak up were muzzled and marginalized. They could smell the sweet scent of the gravy train that tortured their sensory glands and produced saliva in overdrive but never had the chance to join in on the feast. That feast was reserved for Kufour and his inner circle. Feast troglodytes! Kufour never worried about the day of reckoning but the people had other ideas.

How do you as president, Kufour, travel to America and stay in the Woldorf Astoria and Willard Hotel, the most expensive hotels one can find? How do you as president, order the sale of a government house to an ex-minister that you fired? How do you, as president, order luxury jets when you just sold a jet bought by your predecessor for pennies on the dollar? How do you continue to pay chiefs at a time when we can’t pay doctors and nurses to stay in the country? Yet you Kufour, had the crass nerve to seek medical attention outside Ghana on numerous occasions! Not only that, your ministers and cronies also enjoyed this luxury even as our mothers, sisters, brothers, fathers and uncles die within the Ghanaian system that you callously and ineptly supervised. Do you Kufour, remember when you told us that corruption started with Adam and Eve so it is nothing new? Then you told us to go to the police if we had evidence even though you won’t give us the right to get the information that we needed. Do you Kufour, remember the energy crisis? What about Haruna Esseku and the money train that went on at the castle? Then you Kufour, kept playing politics with the trial of Konadu. If the woman is guilty, prove it and end this circus. I don’t care for Konadu but I sure don’t care for the circus designed for political gain. What about the cement scandal Kufour? Did you do as promised? Who cashed the 17 million dollar cheque? Why are we still paying high prices for cement? What about the high price of petrol in Ghana even as the price of oil falls precipitously? Over 10 million Ghanaians live under $1 a day! Wow Kufour you’ve really delivered!

Folks, no matter how you dice and slice it, Kufour is a lazy leader who has performed below average. His wickedness was not just towards the entire country but his own party. Kufour no doubt saw himself as an absolute monarch who could dictate from his dingy palace. First he tried to manipulate the chairmanship of the NPP party. He was rebuffed and thrown under the bus on that issue. But his appetite will not subside!! Then, ignoring his own vice president who was running and needed his endorsement, he clandestinely teamed up with his gaggle from Oseikrom and tried to surreptitiously foist Alan Cash on the party. This also failed and he ended up being baldy battered and bruised from that self-seeking escapade. Indeed, the latter monkey bars maneuver left the party with visible cracks since the Akyem faction felt slighted. In the end, Nana Addo prevailed having reminded Kufour and his Oseikrom mafia that he waited his turn and has done all that was expected of him. If you hitch Kufour’s divisive activities in his own party with the divisiveness in the country, are you surprised? Look what they did with the Ga Mantse, Awomefia, and Ya Na situation. Kufour has never been for a united country. Look how other chiefs were snubbed even while foreign dignitaries were shepherded to Manhyia to the exclusion of all. Ghanaians saw this buffoonery and are expressing their disapproval. We are trying to build a democracy not a monarchy! Look what they’ve done to local government even though the Danquah/Busia tradition hounded Nkrumah with decentralization! Are we killing local government for the benefit of chieftaincy? I thought local government was their bread and butter! No?

No matter how you look at this election, the NDC has done well. The voters may be saying that it is the lesser of two evils in this context. Finally, people are fed up with the arrogance and misrule of Kufour. However, the more pressing worry currently is whether we are at the dawn of the third coming of Emperor Rawlings? The concern is that Atta Mills is not his own man and will have to take orders and modulate to the vituperations of JJ the wacko! While these concerns are legitimate, they may be a day late and certainly a dollar short, if Atta Mills should pull it off. It amazes me that some of those who are worried stiff about JJ’s third coming, are the very ones who cheered on the misrule of Kufour and assumed that Ghanaians will never wise up to the corruption and tribalism that we saw with our naked eyes. Yes, we should worry that JRJ is lurking in the background and waiting to free his wife from the rule of law. However, did the NPP not play into the hands of Rawlings by addling a lazy and inept president and using the trial of JRJ’s wife for political gain? Jail the woman if she is guilty and let’s get on with it! Did the NPP not make the current situation possible by marginalizing our best and brightest and selling everything off to foreigners? Not a single NPP high ranking official was prosecuted for corruption. Can you believe it? Not even Alhaji Bamba the visa racketeer!!

In my book, the solution to the JJ menace is good governance. If Kufour had ruled well, JJ will not be a factor now. After all, JJ had enough baggage to drown himself. It is amazing how the NPP accused the NDC of tribalism and then hopped into power to dispense their variety. The NPP became strong architects of crony capitalism and shameless quislings. They gave Rawlings this life line that he covets. They made it possible for JRJ to reinvent himself at a time when he should either be in jail for his own crimes or at least be off the scene. There is a price for everything and today, we are paying the price for Kufour inanities.

Kufour’s arrogance and disrespect for the people have come to bite us all big time. I certainly will not lose sleep over JRJ lurking in the background. If the NDC fails to keep him in check, should they win eventually, they will surely be booted out of office sooner than they care to know. A great majority of us deserve what we get if we refuse to speak truth to power and instead, acquiesce to the nonsense that unfolded in the Kufour regime. If you vote for a party, you must understand that it is your responsibility to hold that party responsible. Don’t think you can vote for your party and expect others to hold them responsible. Criticism from within is more powerful that from without. And if you don’t hold your party responsible, no amount of political trickery, bribery or deception will fool the people into keeping you in power. No! Not if you call them lazy and misuse their scant resources foolishly even as they suffer endlessly.

No matter who wins in the end, we must come together as Ghanaians and support him, knowing that the message has been delivered. What is unfolding is a good sign for Ghana’s toddler democracy. However, we cannot just rest on voting. The real work happens in between elections and that calls for hard work and being vigilant. When we hold our elected leaders responsible, we make mother Ghana much better. And for the partisans, you save your self heartaches like the current cliffhanger by pushing for responsibility, transparency and accountability way before the election. Good governance cures the need to pray for peace before elections and worry about who is ordained to rule. Isn’t it amazing that in times of want we find God and even attribute messages that are surely not God’s? Even wicked and callous persons like Kufour know God when elections rolls around. Just imagine what God would or could have done for you, Kufour, if you placed the interest of our children and women ahead of your jolly junkets (JJ)! The time to pay is now! Look what you’ve done to the NPP? Shame on you! Change is the name of the game!

Nii Lantey Okunka Bannerman

(Also known as the double edge sword)

I don’t give them hell, I tell the truth and they think it is hell. Harry Truman