By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 20, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The Graphic.com.gh article that carried his clarion call for the party faithful and stalwarts to close ranks around its 2016 Presidential Candidate and his running-mate was erroneously captioned “NPP Must Suspend the ‘Suspensions’ – Kwame Pianim” (12/15/15). This is quite refreshing, because I have been waiting for precisely this kind of solemn exhortation from unarguably one of the most astute bulwarks behind the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). The Yale University-educated Mr. Pianim knows what it means to be harassed and buffeted by those who ought to be rather helping to put winds into one’s sails.

Years ago, his well-deserved presidential ambitions were myopically and cynically torpedoed by some internal party detractors who deviously perceived his heroic political past as a liability for the party. The Graphic’s caption was clearly erroneous because Mr. Pianim was less concerned about the raging rage of suspensions in the party than the immediate and imperative need for the New Patriotic Party to roll out its 2016 Presidential Campaign Agenda in order to allow it the direly needed fighting chance in the barely twelve months left for Ghanaians to determine the fate of the pathologically corrupt and perennially bumbling Mahama government.

“Let’s all sacrifice our pride for the good of Ghana; let’s sacrifice our pride for the [good of] the suffering masses of Ghana; let’s sacrifice and get together to work in a campaign mood.” His declaration, of course, comes ahead of the Dec. 19 Emergency Confab in the Brong-Ahafo capital of Sunyani. The timing could thus not have been more auspicious. Needless to say, Mr. Pianim is a successful businessman who fully appreciates the oxygen of time in the strategic scheme of winsome politics. He also fully appreciates the fact that merely having been elected to a top administrative position in the party does not offer one a blank check to hold the collective needs, interests and aspirations of the people hostage.

Which is why he is emphatic in his call on the imperative need for the flagbearer to select his own campaign team, instead of blindly and unwisely relying on elected party machinists who may not necessarily have the best interest of the flagbearer and the party at large at heart. In the preceding sense, Mr. Pianim could be aptly envisaged to have been a studious observer of the factors and causes underlying much of the bitter infighting that has been raging at the New Patriotic Party’s Asylum Down Headquarters. Which is why the former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the erstwhile Cocoa-Marketing Board, presently COCOBOD, counsels that all suspended party administrators should avoid wasteful litigation suits until the party has had a full uninhibited shot at the 2016 general election.

This observation clearly appears to gibe with the punitive objective of both the party’s Disciplinary Committee and the NPP’s National Executive Committee. For clearly, the indefinite suspension of the so-called Big Three, namely, Messrs. Paul Afoko, Kwabena Agyepong and Sammy Crabbe was geared towards inducing the requisite climate of progressive harmony at party headquarters. And, indeed, even as Nana Akufo-Addo poignantly and eloquently articulated in his Sunyani Emergency Congress Address, the abject insubordination of the aforementioned three top party administrators to the regulatory organs of the party inevitably necessitated their immediate sequestration, if the long-term health of the New Patriotic Party was to be guaranteed.

Those of our readers who have sedulously followed my media offerings on the man are well aware of my great admiration for Mr. Pianim, not to be confused with Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani, the former Kufuor Chief-of-Staff, even when I have had to take issue with him on occasion. Mr. Pianim laments that the inordinately protracted internal party wrangling has left him a “broken and frustrated man.” I believe in the sincerity of such public confession. We also hope that those among the top-echelons of the party’s leadership who claim to be utterly rattled by the gross mismanagement of the country’s human and capital resources are paying serious attention.

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