Intraparty Violence Is Inescapably Political

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 8, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

I strongly disagree with Dr. Kwesi Aning of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center that the sort of intraparty violence that took the lives of Messrs. Adams Mahama and Abubakar Saddiq, both of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), can be divorced from the sort of hateful and irresponsible rhetoric by politicians that led to such heinous crimes against humanity. I have expatiated extensively on the chain of coldly calculated events that culminated in the assassination of Mr. Mahama, the former Upper-East Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party and do not intend to rehash the same here. What I simply want to observe here is that both interparty and intraparty violence ought to be unreservedly condemned, for both forms of violence are equally inimical to the salutary development of Ghanaian democracy (See “Intraparty Violence Threatening Ghana’s Democracy – Kwesi Aning” Graphic.com.gh / Ghanaweb.com 11/8/15).

What is presently raging in the New Patriotic Party is the flat and adamant refusal by leaders who have had their full-turn at the presidency and their megalomaniacal and kleptocratic hangers-on to come to a full realization and civilized appreciation of the fact that it is time for them to comfortably enjoy their generously subsidized retirement benefits and let others so mandated by the party to take the nation to its next stage of socioeconomic and political development. We must also quickly point out that until his indefinite suspension by the National Executive Committee of the New Patriotic Party (NPP-NEC), the Executive Committees of at least seven of the ten regions of the country representing the NPP had voted unanimously to relieve the National Chairman of the party, Mr. Paul Afoko, and the party’s General-Secretary, Mr. Kwabena Agyei Agyepong, of their posts. The Asante Region was one of the only three regions that had either failed or flatly refused to call for the immediate resignations of Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong.

And so it is not the least bit surprising that a constituency chairman at Asawase, a suburb of the Asante regional capital of Kumasi, should be calling for the immediate resignation of the party’s overwhelmingly elected presidential candidate. We also learn to our utter horror, but hardly our surprise, that it was Mr. Isaac Brenya’s rude and insulting call for the resignation of Nana Akufo-Addo which directly resulted in the savage slaying of Mr. Abubakar Saddiq. And so somebody, in addition to the assassins, has to bear responsibility for the criminal spillage of Mr. Saddiq’s blood. We shall take up this aspect of the case more fully in due course.

For now, it well appears that in its come hell or sunshine determination to scuttle the chances of Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia gaining access and legitimate entry into the Flagstaff House, the Kufuor-Kyerematen faction of the New Patriotic Party has opened up two apertures of low-level warfare in the party. One group, which is led by a Mr. Daniel Baah-Acheamfuor and his Fifth-Column group called “Save NPP Now!,” has been assigned the nihilistic task of steadily and systematically assassinating the reputation and character of Nana Akufo-Addo; while the second group, led by Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong, with the full-backing of the mean-spirited likes of Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani, Andrews Awuni and the rest of the hoodlum pack, concentrate on stultifying the organizational structures of the party as a means of effectively rendering the Akufo-Addo Campaign feckless. In the brutal assassinations of Messrs. Mahama and Saddiq, we see a third internal war front opened up whose modus operandi is one that is squarely predicated on terrorism and the use of raw intimidation.

Mr. Kufuor may likely have acquired this strategic use of gangland culture from the seven “revolutionary” months that he spent as a star pupil of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and a cabinet appointee of the bloody regime of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the direct antecedent of the present-day Mahama-led National Democratic Congress. Ultimately, what we have here is a battle for the soul and organizational integrity of both the New Patriotic Party and the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition. And it is quite obvious that the best bet of the Atwima Mafia inheres in the Nkrumaesque creation of a Kufuor Tradition. Well, our elders say, we live to see.