Is Kwesi Pratt Afraid of an Akufo-Addo Presidency?

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

Garden City, New York

Oct. 14, 2014

E-mail: [email protected]

For a stalwart member of a political party that made Mr. Kwame Nkrumah Ghana's President-for-Life to be castigating leading members of the country's main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), who have openly and democratically declared their support for the party's most popular and formidable presidential candidacy contestant ahead of the October 18 NPP delegates' congress, makes Mr. Kwesi Pratt the most criminally hypocritical Ghanaian political activist, commentator and journalist (See "Mass Declaration of Support in NPP Primaries in 'Bad Taste' - Kwesi Pratt" MyJoyOnline.com 10/4/14).

Mr. Pratt is also widely known to be a staunchly unabashed supporter of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), which claims to be the most legitimate heir of Nkrumah's faux-socialist ideological leanings, and the most authentic incarnation of the original Convention People's Party (CPP).

The problem that Mr. Pratt, editor-publisher of the Insight newspaper, clearly has with the New Patriotic Party is the fact that for the first time since 2004, the rank-and-file membership of the NPP has matured into a salutary and pragmatic acceptance of the imperative need to rally behind the party's most formidable presidential candidacy contestant at the moment, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, as the surest way of returning the NPP to power, as well as effectively promoting the civilized and progressive ideals of Messrs. Danquah, Busia and Dombo.

And, of course, Mr. Pratt is eerily aware of the fact that if the New Patriotic Party is voted back into the seat of democratic governance, his credibility as a suave and sophistic political commentator would suffer irreparable damage. In other words, the rump-Convention People's Party (r-CPP) guru has seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall; and Mr. Pratt does not like it one bit. To be certain, the man is only months away from publicly peeing and defecating in his pants.

You see, what is most irritating here about Mr. Pratt is the fact that as long as he got handsomely paid for perennially muddying the political waters for the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party, through his highly divisive and tawdry rhetoric, all was well and hunky-dory with the country. Which was why the man sat gaily through the crude and forcible ramming of the the candidacy of the now-late President John Evans Atta-Mills, through three consecutive electoral seasons, by strongman Jerry John Rawlings, down the throats of members and supporters of the National Democratic Congress and found absolutely nothing wrong with the same! Back then, not even once did Mr. Pratt point his index finger at Chairman Rawlings, vis-a-vis the fact that other equally capable presidential candidacy contestants were being undemocratically preempted.

Now, all of a sudden, Mr. Pratt claims to envisage sterling leadership qualities in nearly each and every one of three or four NPP presidential candidacy aspirants poised to duking it out in the October 18 party primary. But, of course, those of us who have been studiously following his simian political antics are fully aware of the fact that Mr. Pratt is only crying foul now because his choice of presidential candidate for the New Patriotic Party, and fellow double-dealing political scam-artist, has been roundly and resoundingly rejected by the forward-looking NPP delegates and eligible voters.

It is also rather absurd for Mr. Pratt to suppose that the key operatives of the NPP would unctuously prioritize President Mahama's dithering IMF-World Bank bailout overtures over and above strategically and more meaningfully, and perspicuously, positioning the most progressive and democratic Fourth-Republican political party's chances of winning Election 2016, and returning the country to the irreversible path of middle-income status within the shortest possible time. A rather intellectually and morally obtuse feint at tactical distraction. And to the latter, we say "Fat Chance, Mr. Pratt!!!"