Is Alan the "Modest" NPP Presidential Candidate for Election 2016?

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

In 2008, when he lost the New Patriotic Party's flagbearer's race, Mr. Alan John Kwadwo "Quitman" Kyerematen threatened to resign from the NPP. A Committee of Elders of the party set up to patch up Mr. Kyerematen's purported grievances against Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the candidate who had convincingly defeated Mr. Kyerematen, concluded that Alan Cash, as Mr. Kyerematen is widely known, was only carrying a rotten sack of red-herrings. Mr. B. J. DaRocha and his associates of the most well-respected members of the party were unable to convince the flagbearer runner-up to rescind his decision to leave the New Patriotic Party. The NPP had barely four months to campaign for the presidency and a shot at the Flagstaff House. That is how "modest" Alan Cash is.

Nearly four years later, the pathologically egocentric renegade returned to the party and casually flouted the NPP constitution by running for flagbearer. Again, Mr. Kyerematen miserably lost the contest against his arch-rival and, some have even hinted, arch-nemesis and fellow Kufuor cabinet member, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. And just recently, Mr. Kyerematen announced his decision to, once again, vie for the party's flagbearership against the man who beat him twice, respectively, in 2008 and 2012. The last time when he ran against Ghana's former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Alan Cash had not even been a member of the NPP for the constitutionally stipulated five years for renegade returnees.

This, at any rate, ought to come as welcome news for Ghana's largest political party, which also literally wields a monopoly on the accolade of being the most liberal and democratic political organization in the country's Fourth Republic. But that "Candidate Modesty" was actually allowed to flout party rules in 2012, of executive non-participation for at least five years, raises a question that has yet to be satisfactorily answered by party chiefs. And it is also such a gaping anomaly of cavalierly bucking established protocol that makes Mr. Kyerematen's admonishment to party members, supporters and sympathizers to fielding a "modest" personality as its flagbearer for Election 2016 all the more laughable and inexcusably presumptuous.

In 2008, when he rudely and abruptly resigned from the party, Mr. Kyerematen categorically informed the now-late Mr. DaRocha, chairman of the NPP Elders Committee set up to iron out any real and/or perceived differences that Mr. Cash claimed to exist between Nana Akufo-Addo and himself, that his political ambitions and interests far transcended the ideological purview of the New Patriotic Party. In essence, he, Mr. Kyerematen, was far bigger in personality and stature than the entire membership of the NPP. This is how epically modest the man envisages himself to be.

Anyway, Mr. Kyerematen also claims to understand what he terms as "Ghanaian Voter Psychology" more than any party stalwart. But, of course, the party delegates vehemently beg to differ with Mr. Cash, as on two occasions they had not hesitated to rudely hand the self-proclaimed genius Voter-Psychologist crushing defeats in the NPP presidential primaries.

But what is even far more interesting here is that like most of his NPP colleagues and associates, Mr. Kyerematen firmly believes that President John Dramani Mahama has not been performing creditably at the helm of our national affairs. Mr. Kyerematen also clearly believes that Mr. Mahama is relatively more modest in demeanor than the twice-defeated presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Ultimately, however, the pertinent question to ask here is that since the purported behavioral modesty of Ghana's last two presidents, Messrs. John Evans Atta-Mills, of late, and John Dramani Mahama only seems to have garnered for the country an apocalyptically bleak macro-economy and quality-of-life status, isn't it well about time that Ghanaian voters tried a little morally refreshing immodesty by electing an imperious leader capable of affording them value for their money, as it were?

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 20, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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