Bright Akwetey Is Not That Bright, After All ...

I have written about the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Club House before, vis-à-vis the apparently expedient timing of its donation by Mr. Hackman Owusu-Agyeman, an aspiring NPP presidential candidate. However, in terms of its functional significance, I have unreservedly lauded Mr. Owusu-Agyeman’s quite noble decision to create an auspicious venue for ideological and intellectual enrichment among members of the ruling NPP and all ardent lovers of democracy as a gesture that ought to be promptly emulated throughout the country.

Significantly, what differentiates the New Patriotic Party’s Club House from the infamous Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, for instance, is the fact that, unlike the latter, the NPP Club House provides a salutary forum for the voluntary and democratic exchange of ideas and the dissemination of critical political knowledge in a liberal institutional milieu. The Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, originally housed on the sprawling campus of Winneba’s University of Education, on the other hand, peremptorily sought to cannibalize and strait-jacket unsuspecting Ghanaians into passive and servile automatons of a pseudo-Marxist ideology called “Nkrumaism,” an ideology which, to-date, none of the fire-spitting neo-Cii-Pii-Pii-ites have been able to intelligibly and intelligently explain to Ghanaians. Not that there is, indeed, anything worth explaining, or expounding, about “Nkrumaism,” a veritable cult-of-personality that gaily trucks by such obtuse and protean slogans as the “African Personality” and a “United States of Africa,” even as its proto-pontiff vigorously, secretly and hypocritically traded with the erstwhile Apartheid and racist government of South Africa (see Kwame Arhin’s The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah).
But, perhaps, what needs to be even more significantly highlighted is the fact that whereas the Winneba-based Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute recklessly appropriated public funds with the sole and exclusive objective of glorifying – in fact, apotheosizing – the putative African Show Boy, the NPP Club House was erected with the donor’s own hard-earned, and private, capital resources. In view of the preceding – verifiable – fact, it is not quite clear just what Mr. Bright Akwetey means by his rather cynical and jaundiced assertion that the “NPP’s seven years of ruling indicate [that] they came to enrich their pockets [whatever that means] and those of their families and cronies, under the guise of their so-called philosophy of property-owning democracy” (Ghanaweb.com 9/19/07).
At least, to the best of my knowledge nobody, during the last seven years of Fourth Republican Ghana, has publicly, or even privately, accused the Kufuor Government of having shipped some six solid gold bars outside the country by using a major cabinet appointee as a courier or front man. Likewise, Hotel Kufuor and other such propagandistic bunk and all, no credible Ghanaian patriot has, to-date, either publicly or privately, accused any member of President Kufuor’s cabinet of having extravagantly and ostentatiously exceeded his known lifestyle by purchasing a gold-bed, for example, for either that cabinet appointee’s wife or girlfriend.
Maybe some levelheaded Ghanaian also needs to remind Mr. Akwetey, an aspiring Convention People’s Party (CPP) presidential candidate, that the corrupt political culture of “10-percent contractual commission” was invented by the African Show Boy and his so-called Convention People’s Party. And does any Ghanaian adult of President Kufuor’s generation not remember the infamous Kassardjian Scandal? And here, also, I humbly own that yours truly had not yet been born; but then, if he may hasten to add, neither has any fetish priest of Kankan been able to prevent me from accessing the incontrovertible facts from the erudite likes of Professors Dennis Austin and L. H. Ofosu-Appiah, among a host of others. And just how did the very man after whom the august Accra Sports Stadium was recently renamed land himself in the slammer? Needless to say, nothing is more painful than being accused of theft by a certified kleptocrat!
In the September 19, 2007 Ghanaweb.com article which, we are told, originally appeared in the hip-shooting Ghanaian Observer, and was imperiously titled “Demolish NPP Club House – Akwetey,” the eponymous CPP presidential aspirant is reported to be calling for the summary demolition of the New Patriotic Party Club House, on the unpardonably fatuous grounds that the latter, which is directly located across from the street opposite Ghana’s Electoral Commission, “may contain all kinds of equipment which the Party might use to rig the presidential and parliamentary elections in December 2008.”
Perhaps Mr. Akwetey ought to be invited by the Speaker of Ghana’s National Assembly to explain to the country exactly how the ruling New Patriotic Party was able to handily win the 2000 and 2004 general elections, without the NPP having owned any club house either directly or indirectly located opposite the headquarters of the Electoral Commission. In sum, if Mr. Akwetey has no constructive agenda for the development of Ghana, other than his evidently Quixotic and narcissistic desire for power, he would do the rest of his fellow countrymen and women far better service by promptly desisting from the issuing of such brazen insults to their intelligence, as well as the intelligence of the astute, patriotic and diligent likes of Dr. Afari-Djan.
In the final analysis, about the only meaningful upshot of Mr. Akwetey’s interview with the Ghanaian Observer regards the interviewee’s affirmation of what many a patriotic Ghanaian voter, or elector, has always known. And it is the fact that functionally and ideologically speaking, there is absolutely no difference between the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the rump Convention People’s Party (CPP). This is what the Ghanaian Observer had to report on the preceding score: “Bright Akwetey also stated that the NDC presidential candidate, Prof. John Evans Atta Mills, originally carried CPP credentials, which is against selling of state enterprises. He affirmed that selling of state property to a few affluent individuals is bad, but he (Prof. Mills) cannot condemn that[,] owing to his [ungodly?] association with the NDC tradition today.” Interestingly, ironically and characteristically opportunistically, Mr. Akwetey also made the following promise to the Ghanaian Observer reporter who interviewed him: “Prof. Mills has CPP background; but he is compelled to believe in the NDC tradition. The NDC has run this country before, and they sold [our] national assets so cheaply to people who are not even [interested in] utilizing those assets…. Since it is evidently clear that the NDC presidential candidate does not believe in selling off state property, we intend to woo Professor Mills to the side of the CPP.”
And just who “compelled” Professor John Evans Atta-Mills “to believe in the [profligate and nihilistic] NDC tradition”? Mr. Akwetey offered no answer in his interview with the Ghanaian Observer. No matter, because we firmly believe that we know the answer: It was the same primal and feral greed that impelled the likes of the African Show Boy and his CPP Abongo Boys to suicidally snag themselves in what the globally celebrated JIBOWU COMMISSION termed as the Cocoa Purchasing Company Scandal.

Then again, who knows? Perhaps Chairman Rawlings draggled Professor Atta-Mills out of one of the latter’s reportedly popular lectures on taxation, whipped out one of his signature shoe-tucked pistols, and bid the Legon legal wonk draw up a strategic plan for the sale of GIHOC.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “When Dancers Play Historians and Thinkers,” a forthcoming collection of essays on postcolonial Ghanaian politics. E-mail: [email protected].

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.