By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

About 48 hours before a conference of New Patriotic Party (NPP) delegates was scheduled to elect party administrators in preparation for Election 2016, a pack of goons in an unregistered or plateless taxicab and two motorbikes was reported to have opened fire into a crowd of merrymaking NPP members and supporters in the Tamale suburb of Aboabo, seriously injuring at least nine people (See "NPP Supporters Must Adopt Fire-for-Fire Approach - Effah Dartey" MyJoyOnline.com 4/12/14).

As of this writing (4/13/14), all nine victims of the drive-by shooting were reported to be in stable condition and convalescing at the Tamale Teaching Hospital. As yet, no NPP operative who has spoken about the incident has pointed a finger at any specific political opponent, though several key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) have gone on record as vehemently declaring and insisting on the Northern Regional Capital and, in fact, the Northern Region at large being the no-go stranglehold of the country's most violent political party.

Another key NDC operative had also earlier on decried an announcement by the Tamale Metropolitan Police Department that it intended to put up a heavy security presence throughout the proceedings of the NPP delegates' conference. Well, I have said this before and hereby reiterate the same, that the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress are inimitably adept at projecting their New Patriotic Party counterparts as being clinically prone to scheming violent activities, while these NDC operatives suavely go about their trademark business of terror-sponsorship and the wanton creation of mayhem and fear among the ranks of their most formidable political opponents.

On Thursday last, Capt. Nkrabeah Effah-Dartey, then aspiring for the general-secretaryship of the NPP, exhorted the party's supporters not to be intimidated by such wanton acts of depravity. "Let it be known to all that times are changing. The rules of the game now seem to invite fire-for-fire, but this politics of intimidation and violence must stop before it is met with equal or even a more brutal form of its [own] kind," Capt. Effah-Dartey was widely reported to have warned. He was also reported to have said that if voted General-Secretary of the NPP, he would devise a means of facilitating the vigorous and effective self-defense by party members and supporters against their most virulent political opponents.

Indeed, it clearly cannot be gainsaid that Capt. Effah-Dartey's cautionary note goes even farther in thrust than Nana Akufo-Addo's much-maligned "All-Die-Be-Die" mantra; and so the retired Ghana Armed Forces attorney cannot be accurate in his assessment that the proverbial rules of the game are only now beginning to change. In reality, the key operatives, members, supporters and sympathizers of the NDC have been violent since the commencement of Ghana's fourth-republican democratic dispensation in 1992 and even long before the latter date. For the Rawlings-founded antecedent political juggernaut of the NDC, the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), was founded on "revolutionary terrorism" as a means of entrenching itself, possibly in perpetuity.

As of this writing, Capt. Effah-Dartey was widely reported to have lost his NPP general-secretaryship bid to Mr. Kwabena Agyepong, the former press secretary of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor. We hope that his latest internal political defeat would not signal the end of his otherwise laudable decision to apply some of his military experience into assisting his party to establish an effective system of personal and organizational defense against its most inveterate ideological opponents.

Indeed, Capt. Effah-Dartey could not be more dead-on-target when he poignantly declares to his fellow party members and aficionados as follows: "We cannot sit back and take the bullets and be regarded as cowards." This declaration, once again, deeply cuts into Nana Akufo-Addo's "All-Die-Be-Die" clarion call for collective self-defense. It is also hoped that the injuries of "The Tamale Nine" will be used by the NPP to develop an effective self-defense message similar to the post-Holocaust global Jewry motto of "Never Again!"

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 13, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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