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

Garden City, New York

Oct. 29, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Ordinarily, I would not be wasting my time and breath writing about the Nduom-owned and operated so-called Progressive People's Party (PPP). But sometimes the need for a healthy comic relief in the humdrum grind that is Ghanaian politics, makes such a sideshow an imperative theatrical necessity. In the wake of his election as Eastern Regional Chairman of the PPP, Mr. Fred Dua Agyeman was reported to have asserted that his party is the only credible alternative to both the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) - (See "PPP Is Best Alternative to NDC and NPP - E/R Regional Chair" Citifmonline.com 10/26/14).

Obviously, Mr. Dua Agyeman does not know what he is talking about. But interestingly, this is one of the things that make Fourth-Republican Ghanaian Democracy the West African political cynosure that it veritably is. Which is the right of even marginal party leaders like the PPP's Eastern Regional Chairman to loudly pontificate more out of sheer emotional excitement than either common sense or historical context. The fact of the matter is that the Progressive People's Party was founded more as a direct result of one politically ambitious and wealthy man's disaffection with the daughter of Ghana's first postcolonial leader, Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, the equally politically ambitious National Chairperson of the rump-Convention People's Party (r-CPP), and not the fact of the PPP's having any uniquely constructive agenda for the development of our country.

Significantly, since the Progressive People's Party's leader and his followers split with the r-CPP, the former has yet to win a critical mass of members, supporters and sympathizers. During the country's latest general election, in December 2012, Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom's pet political project garnered only 182,649 of the valid ballots cast, representing a minuscle 1.65-percent of the national ballots. Obviously, Ghanaians seem not to have bought into the self-preening claims of both Messrs. Dua Agyeman and Nduom; and that ought to tell these two men something quite meaningful and instructive. And it is the fact that in the political playbook of most eligible Ghanaian voters, there is absolutely nothing ideologically different and/or remarkable about the four or five groups of Nkrumah-leaning political parties, the largest of which is the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress.

The others, of course, are the Progressive People's Party, the rump-Convention People's Party and the People's National Convention, as well as one or two others whose practical marginality makes them almost as relevant as nonexistent. Indeed, even as this writer has poignantly observed time and again, the best hope for the three Nkrumaist splinter groups to clinching presidential power would be for all three or four of them to merge with the National Democratic Congress. Short of the preceding, none of the three groups is likely to make any viable political headway in the foreseeable future.

But what makes Mr. Dua Agyeman's call even more laughably daunting is the fact that it was made in the country's Eastern Region, the stronghold of the foremost spearhead among the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Trinity. It would have garnered a more remarkable traction if Mr. Dua Agyeman had used either President Nkrumah's native Western Region or even Dr. Nduom's hometown of Edina (Elmina), in the Central Region, as his staging post or electioneering campaign launching pad. The Eastern Region is the undisputed cradle of modern Ghanaian capitalism and the least receptive to the sort of proto-communal socialism preached by Mr. Kwame Nkrumah and his fanatical disciples.

It is also instructive to observe that, to-date, other than its 1979 electoral debacle, the Danquah-Busia-Dombo camp has remained steadily unified and united as a group, even if it also remains the more factionally raucous of the country's two major political parties. And there is good reason to believe that 2016 would mark another bumper electoral harvest year for the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party. But, of course, this would not happen without stiff, albeit ultimately ineffectual, resistance from the Mahama-led government of the so-called National Democratic Congress.