I Salute Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey

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

A leader and a statesman, and a stateswoman, for that matter, it has been said, is one who rises to the occasion in times of crisis. "Jake's Open-Letter to NPP Members and Supporters" (See Ghanaweb.com 9/26/13) demonstrates just that. And if anybody has been fervidly gunning for the super-anchor's job of the New Patriotic Party's National Chairman, in the lead up to the NPP primaries, I am afraid that party stalwart would have to defer to Jake until this stormy season of double-pillage - both political and judicial - has been successfully and constructively negotiated and/or forded. For Jake is the man of the moment, and those who look forward to an authentic "Better Ghana Agenda" had better fall in line behind him.

My major aim here is to encourage each and every well-meaning member, supporter and sympathizer of the New Patriotic Party to read the National Chairman's most recent exhortation to the party faithful to stand firm with a definitive sense of purpose and prideful vindication that, indeed, Election 2012 was not actually lost but rather, it radically exposed the gaping cracks in the way that elections are conducted in our country.

What is also significant to note here is the fact that this is not virgin territory, for this is not the very first time that the New Patriotic Party has been criminally robbed at the polls - in his concisely, albeit comprehensively, written exhortation to party faithful, Chairman Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey recalls glaring instances of mandate usurpation, beginning with the faux-democratic leadership phase of the infamous Chairman Jerry John Rawlings in 1992 and again, in 1996.

I believe it was the 1992 National Democratic Congress' plunder of the electoral mandate of the sovereign people of Ghana that found eloquent expression in the landmark Adu-Boahen testimonial document that came to be widely known as The Stolen Verdict. Short of an auspicious Al-Shabab kind of an apocalyptic blitz-krieg, Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey makes it constructively and poignantly clear that the kind of robber-baron culture that is the philosophical mantra of the ethnic minority-dominated National Democratic Congress (NDC) is here to stay.

This is not, however, to say that the majority of the Ghanaian electorate ought to casually brook or tolerate it. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Rather, it simply means that the scions of Messrs. Danquah, Busia and Dombo have a lot of political heavy-lifting to do, none the least of which patriotic duty is to unite around the common salutary agenda of restoring the property-owning, brother's-keeper humanistic and democratic ideology propunded by these political legends.

Still, what makes Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey's clarion call for unity even more imperative is the signal recognition, by the NPP National Chairman, that charity, perforce, ought to begin at home. The kind of treacherous electioneering campaign at the primaries level, unwisely and insidiously aimed at the total destruction of one's "political rival," rather than one's "political opponent," is one that rather primitively, parochially and paradoxically defeats the entire purpose of making Ghana an enviably functioning democracy of the most modern kind.

This aspect of Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey's exhortation to the rank-and-file membership of the NPP could not be more opportune. To be certain, it is actually long overdue, when cast within the urgent context of the country's current acute crisis of leadership. That the man who megalomaniacally and unconscionably stole the mandate of the sovereign people of Ghana should be faulting the constitutionally legitimate decision by his victims to condignly deprive him of his ill-gotten power to govern, is all the more to be pitied.

Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey's call for early primaries for the election of party officials and parliamentary candidates, in order to remarkably and temporally meliorate the impact of the rancor and bitterness which invariably and routinely attend this process among the ranks of key party operatives is smack-dab in order. The epic battle for democratic leadership ought to be organized, regimented and executed in much the same manner that the best Olympic athletes from the most advanced nations set about preparing for their laurels. It is not undertaken in fits and starts, as has routinely and unsavorily become the norm on the NPP side of our national political equation. Discipline and Timeliness ought to be the watch words here. Kudos, Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey!

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Sept. 27, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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