The NPP Is Ghana’s Best Political Party, Says Kofi Annan

On the Ghanaian cyber-front, today (August 1, 2007) has been quite a slow one for news analysts like me. On the American front, however, this has been a particularly difficult and tragic day. And on the latter score, of course, I am referring to the rush-hour bridge failure in the State of Minnesota, in the twin-cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The bridge collapsed into the world-famous Mississippi River and sent a conservatively estimated fifty vehicles plunging down and floating away like card-boxes, almost like the ones with which I constructed model cars and trucks with my playmates at Kwabenya while growing up in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
I also found myself, in a knee-jerk reaction, calling up relatives whom I had not spoken to for nearly a decade, to make sure that they were all safe and sound. In the wake of Wednesday’s tragedy, my long silence made me feel a little guilty. But I quickly recovered by assuring myself that if I, in turn, meant anything significant to any of these relatives, they would also have called to find out how I was faring; on either side, but for the apocalyptic bridge collapse, it didn’t seem as if we cared that much about one another.
Anyway, thankfully, none of my relatives had been adversely affected by the Minnesota tragedy. Nonetheless, it goes without saying that my heartfelt sympathies also resided with the victims, their relatives, friends and colleagues.
Yet, what actually piqued my interest regarded the fact that the same bridge failure could easily occur in Ghana during a heavy-traffic hour. In 1969, a Ghanaian couple, who were either acquaintances or friends of my mother, was washed off the Nsawam Bridge into the Densu River shortly after a flush flood. The Minnesota incident pretty much reminded me of this 38-year-old Ghanaian tragedy. I also wondered what the response of Ghanaian rescue workers would be like, in terms of time and reach, or effectiveness. And then I immediately wondered when was the last time that the Adomi Bridge (also known as the Senchi Bridge, if I recall correctly) had been inspected for structural damage and then promptly repaired, or even repaired at all. And then I really began to feel frightened.
We are told, for instance, that the Minnesota bridge which collapsed on August 1, 2007, was reported to have been inspected twice in the same number of years; and what is more, at the time of its sectional collapse, the Interstate 35 West (or I-35W) was undergoing some structural and what one civil engineer termed as “cosmetic repairs.” Then I turned to my wife and wistfully muttered: “I don’t think I would ever cross the Volta at Adomi again.” I had done just that twice, in 1975 and 1976, while I was a pupil at the Akuapem-Akropong Middle Boys’ Boarding School, SALEM, on an excursion trip to Togo. (At the time of this typing, August 3, 2007, the U.S. Department of Transportation had announced that structural deficiencies had been discovered on the I-35W bridge, which collapsed on August 1, as far back as 1990. Millions of dollars appears to have also been spent in the wake of the discovery, apparently to no avail).
Interestingly, the I-35 West bridge was constructed at about the same period that Ghana’s Adomi Bridge was built, circa. 1967; and so the eerie connection that I automatically made between them was not as far-fetched as it might have initially seemed. Another interesting thing is that Adomi’s American sister has the kind of privileged “medical” insurance that ought not to have seen it drop into the Mississippi like an overly-ripe banana. I hope this readily brings home to the reader, my quite reasonable cause for concern, barring, of course, the possibility of the bridge’s collapse being the brainchild of a terror mastermind.
At the time of this writing (August 1 and 2, 2007 – for I had been abruptly interrupted by my exactly 22-month-old son, Nana Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe III, the previous night) four bodies had been pulled out of the Great American River, with an estimated 20 more commuters reportedly missing.
Interestingly, the original focus of this article hinged on Mr. Kofi Annan’s most recent address to the Ghana National Assembly or House of Parliament. A Ghana News Agency (GNA) report appeared on the address which was published on Ghanaweb.com on July 31, 2007. Titled “Annan Cautions Politicians to Avoid Inflammatory Statements,” the report went on to quote the former United Nations Secretary-General as proclaiming that since taking over from the politically extortionate so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) in 2000, the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) had heroically reduced Ghana’s rate of poverty from a whopping 52-percent, under the P/NDC government, to the highly encouraging and commendable rate of 35-percent. But even more significantly, Mr. Annan had noted, implicitly, that if Ghana were to gloriously attain the UN-stipulated Millennial Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty in our model African country by 2015, the imperative need for Ghanaian voters to returning the NPP to power, come Election 2008, could hardly be discounted.
“And this [NPP poverty-reduction feat] is not the end; for Ghana [under the able and versatile government of the NPP] is set to surpass the Millennial Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015,” affirmed Mr. Annan.
Needless to say, the signal significance of the preceding testimony by Mr. Annan cannot and ought not to be taken lightly; for if the world were looking for the one leader with unalloyed credibility and forthrightness, that leader is almost certain to be the Kumasi-born Mr. Kofi Annan. Coincidentally, this writer shares the same birthday with the retired United Nations chief. And this may, perhaps, partly explain this writer’s affection and reverence for the man and his well-sought opinions. In reality, however, such affection and reverence may be evinced more by Mr. Annan’s deft synergistic interplay of impeccable diplomacy and no-nonsense attitude towards political bullies and megalomaniacs, as proudly witnessed by all Ghanaians and Africans, especially, and the world in general during the Nobel Peace Prize-laureate’s decade-long tenure at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
In fact, so indomitable and formidable was Mr. Annan that he routinely, albeit diplomatically, let President George W. Bush know exactly what this paragon of modern Ghanaian royalty thought about the rash policy of gun-boat diplomacy vis-à-vis such troubled global spots as Iraq, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere. In sum, Mr. Annan, more than any other African leader in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, opened the eyes of the so-called civilized world – or the proverbial West – to the glaring but routinely ignored fact that astute leadership is not the especial preserve – or monopoly – of any single race or species of humanity.
But, perhaps, even more significantly, Mr. Annan emphasized to the assembly of Ghanaian parliamentarians, the unbested sociopolitical and cultural significance of the Danquah-Busia Tradition as follows: “We need to strengthen our democratic culture just as Malaysia, which attained its independence in the same year as Ghana, did by building progressive economic structures and institutions. Today, Malaysia has a per capita income that is 13 times that of Ghana and, unlike Ghana, it is highly industrialized with a state-of-the-art infrastructure, modern services and a strong research and technological capacity.”
I hope the red neck-scarf-wearing Mr. Bagbin was around to take notes and relate some of what he heard to Mr. Jeremiah John “Cement-Bag” Rawlings. I also hope the ideological fanatics of Nkrumaism heard Mr. Annan loud and clear.