Is Greenstreet afraid of CPP history?

I don’t know who introduced the newly elected 2016 Presidential Candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) to the party or the scandalous faux-ideology of Nkrumaism. Very likely, like yours truly, Mr. Ivor Kobina Greenstreet inherited his ideological suasion from his parents. Perhaps from his father who, together with his mother, has been described as “a University of Ghana don,” whatever that means.

Well, for his information and edification, the new rump-CPP Chief Executive or Comrade Greenstreet, as they prefer to address themselves, at absolutely no time in the country’s history up to the February 24, 1966 military putsch that auspiciously ousted the Nkrumah-led proto-Convention People’s Party regime, did the leaders of the original CPP put the collective interests of the Ghanaian people and the nation’s at large ahead of their own.

It is also patently false for Mr. Greenstreet to declare that the CPP leadership is not made up “a group of individuals who want to enrich themselves” (See “Ivor Greenstreet: CPP Not a Historical Society” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/31/16).

The 45-year-old man may do himself great good to read what President Kwame Nkrumah had to say about the likes of Messrs. Kojo Botsio and Komla Agbeli Gbedemah in his celebrated April 8, 1961 Dawn Broadcast and report back to the very people whose mandate he intends to assiduously work to win come November 7, 2016.

He may have been elected Presidential Candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party, but when it comes to knowledge and appreciation of the history and political track-record of the proto-CPP, Mr. Greenstreet is decidedly a greenhorn, pun intended.

Indeed, my bottom-dollar bet here is that once he has fully recovered from the effects of the toxicity of his triumphal exuberance, Mr. Greenstreet would sober up and follow Messrs. Kwesi Nduom and Abu Sakara (aka Michael Foster) out of the rump-CPP.

Needless to say, a party whose agenda includes a collaborative campaign orchestra with Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings as conductor cannot be considered to be a serious political party. It clearly has no viable future in the mainstream of Ghanaian political culture. And I really don’t know what he was thinking about when he made his alleged overtures to Mrs. Rawlings, but this most lurid and untenably depraved decision almost definitely marks the beginning of the end of any serious ambitions that this professional lawyer may have vis-à-vis Kofi Antubam’s Chair.

It goes without saying that Mr. Greenstreet would have done far better to have signed onto a political marriage pact with the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC), which has a passably more credible Nkrumaist credentials. Fundamentally speaking, the National Democratic Congress is chock-full of far better and more savvy and experienced Nkrumaists than the rump-Convention People’s Party, a ramshackle political organization built more around vacuous nostalgia than the sobering reality of the times.

On the latter score, Mr. Greenstreet would serve himself and his associates much better by paying heed to the foresighted counsel of Mr. Sekou Nkrumah, undoubtedly the most pragmatic and politically savvy among the officially known scions of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah.

Indeed, the 2016 rump-CPP Presidential Candidate portrays himself as one who is living in the proverbial Fool’s Paradise, when Mr. Greenstreet asserts that “Ghanaians will know that, yes, [the rump-CPP] is a real political party and not a historical society.”

The fact of the matter is that Ghanaians are fully aware that the rump-CPP has no relevance beyond archival wistfulness. And even if one concedes it a modicum of historical significance, about the only objective conclusion that the avid student of postcolonial Ghanaian history and culture arrives at is the inescapable fact of the rump-CPP’s being an irreparably bad historical society.

In a recent phone conversation with one of my relatives on Ground Zero, as it were, I pointed out to him that the national political terrain that ought to have been occupied by those claiming to be heirs of President Nkrumah was effectively cannibalized in 1992, when the bulk of the Nkrumaist remnants, the so-called Old Guards, crossed over to the cynical and kleptocratic camp of the Trokosi Nationalists, led by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and the Sogakope Mafia. “If you can’t beat them, then by all means, join them.” There is no better value-for-money admonishment for Comrade Greenstreet than this.