How Can a Party of Autocrats Break a Duopoly?

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

It is rather risible for the leadership of a terror-sponsoring political party like the nominally tautological rump-Convention People's Party (r-CPP) - remember the globally infamous Baffoe-Twumasi Ankrah Affair - to think that it can credibly allege Ghana to be a "duopoly" that needs to be radically reformed into a "trio-poly." These are, of course, the implicit words of Ms. Samia Nkrumah, the motor-mouthed stentorian chairperson of the rump-Convention People's Party and one of the innumerable daughters of Ghana's most notorious and extortionate dictator cum Life-President, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah.

It is risible because the CPP has no enviable track-record of having doggedly pursued democratic leadership and or governance (See "Loyal CPP Members Wanted to Break NDC-NPP Duopoly - Samia" MyJoyOnline.com 4/5/14). The fact of the matter is that the Nkrumah-led proto-CPP had 15 protracted years to develop Ghana into a model constitutional democracy for the rest of continental Africa, but only ended up manufacturing and exporting the globally maligned one-party dictatorship to its African neighbors and may well have also significantly influenced such Afro-Caribbean nations as Trinidad-and-Tobago, and Guyana.

And, of course, most levelheaded and well-meaning Ghanaian voters pretty much appreciate this grim fact, thus their intelligent and perspicuous decision to permanently keep the r-CPP on the gray and politically extraneous margins of Ghanaian society. And so when Ms. Nkrumah imperiously declares her intention to breaking the two-decade "stranglehold on power by the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC)," it is crystal clear that this half-Arab spouse of an Italian citizen does not even half-appreciate what she is talking about.

Indeed, those of us avid students and scholars of Fourth Republican Ghanaian political culture fully appreciate the fact that the CPP long ago morphed into the Rawlings-minted juggernaut of the so-called National Democratic Congress. The two parties are veritable clones hatched out of President Nkrumah's faux-socialist and vainglorious principles of "Nkrumaism." And so Ms. Nkrumah may do well to join hands with the NDC apparatchiks, as wisely advised by her younger brother, Mr. Sekou Nkrumah.

It also ought not to be too difficult for Ms. Nkrumah to appreciate the stark fact that almost each and every one of the key operatives of the NDC is a bona fide dyed-in-the-wool disciple of Nkrumaism. Thus the very decision to revive the old and effectively defunct CPP was an idea that was indisputably dead on arrival (DOA) or stillborn. And this is also the reason why Ms. Nkrumah was able to conclusively, albeit intransigently, arrive at the grim reality of the fact that "the greatest problem currently facing the CPP are members who are easily bought over," come election day, by operatives of the two major parties.

Largely, these shameless political prostitutes and giggolos have defected to the National Democratic Congress, as they come into full practical appreciation of the fact that the rump-CPP is a long-spent political force that has absolutely nothing to offer its members and sympathizers short of the stale and jaded nostalgia of a flagrantly falsified glorious past that is, somehow, capable of being revived and readied for the rapid material improvement of their decidedly destitute lot.

The real problem of the rump-CPP, or rather dilemma, is that while it has been unsavorily mercurial, and even suave, at pillaging polling numbers in order to perennially maintain its stranglehold on our national politics, the NDC has absolutely nothing meaningful and worthwhile to offer the Ghanaian people, short of criminally and thoroughly emptying the public till, as well as effectively running our nation's economy aground.

The rump-CPP's best hope for quality-of-life improvement of its members and supporters clearly lies in pledging and forging a common cause with the Danquah-Busia-Dombo-inspired neo-liberal New Patriotic Party. But such commonsensical alliance is highly unlikely to happen anytime soon. The rump-CPP operatives are too snooty, power-hungry and nostalgia-stricken to be able to think straight and progressively for their own good and ideological enlightenment.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 6, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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