By the time this article is published, several key-cabinet appointees of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) would have tendered their resignation to President John Agyekum-Kufuor. While such flurry of resignations has been expected for some time, at least as stipulated by the NPP Constitution, the motive and rationale for demanding that these key-cabinet members hang up their ministerial boots, as it were, on the part of the NPP’s Chief-Constable, while perfectly sound and expedient in principle, may not necessarily bode well for either the national image of the Party, or even the effectiveness of its performance in the final lap to the 2008 presidential and general elections.
To-date, eight ministers have been mentioned as having eagerly positioned themselves on the firing line, as it were. And they include Messrs. Alan Kyerematen, Minister of Trade and Industry (as well as something called PSI, or Presidential Special Initiatives); Kwame Addo-Kufuor, Minister of Defense; Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, Minister of Tourism (and something called Diasporan Affairs); Felix Owusu-Agyapong, Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, as well as Leader of the Majority in Parliament; Papa Owusu-Ankomah, Minister of Education and Sports; Mike Oquaye, Minister of Communications; Hackman Owusu-Agyeman, Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing; and Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Minister of Foreign Affairs (and something called NEPAD, or New Economic Partnership for African Development).
In the main, the preceding cabinet members have publicly declared their intention to seek their Party’s mandate for the chance to replace President Kufuor in the offing. Whoever receives the NPP’s nomination as Presidential Candidate will, of course, have to face-off against Professor John Evans Atta-Mills, of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC).
Mr. Kufuor’s worry appears to be that with a full year-and-half towards the 2008 general elections, it would not be politically expedient for a president poised to leaving a lasting legacy to postcolonial Ghanaian history to keep enfold cabinet members with divided loyalties. And this is all well and good, except that changing the proverbial horses mid-stream may not be just exactly what the doctor ordered, particularly when everything, so far, seems to be running quite efficiently as well as smack dab on schedule. In sum, such an abrupt change, or displacement, in the cultural and political rhythm of the government may give unsavory hints of internal confusion to both the general public and the desperate competitors of the New Patriotic Party. Thus there is every need to handle this delicate but, perhaps, necessary bedevilment of a situation with the utmost skill, care and diplomacy that it certainly demands.
It may also be fitting and proper for the NPP to revisit its Constitution, regarding the temporal protocol governing the filing of nominations by aspiring presidential candidates who are key-cabinet members and their primary campaign schedules. For it goes without saying that in any winsome political gamesmanship, time is of the essence. And some of these presidential aspirants appear to appreciate this much, thus the fact of many of them having unofficially begun their campaign for the Osu Castle almost a year ago, particularly recognizing the remarkable fact of being faced with a presidential contender – or candidate – who has been out on the hustings for all six-and-half years of President Kufuor’s stay in office to date.
Another weird aspect of Fourth Republican Ghanaian politics that needs to be reexamined is the skirt-and-blouse tradition of matching – or is it rather “mismatching” – an executive presidential regime with a parliamentary legislative system, whereby cabinet members are almost invariably appointed out of parliament, rather than being liberally appointed at the discretion of the presidential incumbent, such as is practiced in the United States.
And on the preceding score, it goes without saying that such an unnecessarily strictured executive reach of presidential discretionary powers has the inevitable result of causing the woeful under-utilization of the wide and vast spectrum of available national talent pool. In sum, had the Fourth Republican Constitution of Ghana permitted the appointment of a vast majority of cabinet appointees from outside of the National Assembly, the current presidential dilemma of having to face massive resignation of cabinet members at such a critical administrative juncture, almost akin to an informal vote-of-no-confidence in the President, could have been readily avoided.
As it stands now, and as one writer aptly pointed out in a major privately-owned Ghanaian newspaper, the President will now be forced to appoint substitutes who may not necessarily be seasonable enough to seamlessly take over and perform with the same level of experience, expertise and dexterity as before. And when that happens, the endgame for the Kufuor Administration would likely not be perceived with the same kind of assured sense of conclusive performance as before. Indeed, this may very well have something to do with Mr. Kufuor’s reported decision to allow such centrally significant cabinet members as Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Kyerematen to carry on with their portfolios, at least for the nonce.
Matters may also be further complicated by the fact that following his election as African Union (AU) Chairman, in the run-up to Ghana’s celebration of her half-century of postcolonial sovereignty, the President has virtually become a globetrotting advocate for both his country and the entire continent. Thus, like a prematurely peaked Nkrumah, these days, President Kufuor seems to be spread too thin, as it were, to effectively attend to the primary affairs of those who mandated him as their foremost national leader-in-chief.
In essence, Mr. Kufuor ought not to expect his immediate administrative assistants to play mere onlooker roles at this stage of Ghana’s internal political game, particularly with regard to the election of the next “President Kufuor” of Ghana, so to say. Viewed from any other perspective, the President becomes perceived as rather curiously parochial and self-centered unless, of course, his present attitude towards his presidency-oriented cabinet members is to be construed in terms of the President having already conferred his blessings on Vice-President Aliu Mahama, which would then appear to throw the entire contest for NPP’s presidential nominee into a tizzy, being that it may then be aptly envisaged as a preemptive strike against the Party’s Constitution.
Even so, there doesn’t seem to be anything democratically enviable about the fraught field of presidential aspirants and candidates; and while it is not wholly unprecedented in democratic cultures, still, this patently sophomoric exhibition of complacency on the part of those in vehement denial of the fact of their being far from prime presidential material, is an unnecessary retardant in the NPP’s well-deserved quest for gubernatorial retention and/or continuity.
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