Mr. Portuphy, Let’s Build More Schools, Not Party Offices

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
March 25, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]

Mr. Kofi Portuphy says that Ghanaian voters should not vote for “parties that preach disunity within their own party and tear each other apart” (See “Don’t Vote for Warmongers – Portuphy” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/25/16). The truth of the matter is that it is the leaders of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) who have been inducing the troublemakers in the main opposition New Patriotic Party with bribes for the purpose. It is an open secret that Messrs. Paul Afoko, Kwabena Agyepong and Sammy Crabbe, among a remarkable number of others, are in regular contact and consultations with rogue politicians like Mr. Portuphy, the National Chairman of the NDC.

And so Mr. Portuphy must be living in a fool’s paradise to suppose that most Ghanaian voters are, somehow, too simple-minded to understand what is going on behind the scenes between some of the leaders of both major political parties. You would also think that when he visited Wa, the Upper-West’s regional capital, recently, that the former National Coordinator of the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) would have been cutting sods to begin work on new school buildings, in a bid to drastically reducing the number of schools-under-trees, even as most residents of the Upper-West Region recognize the indescribable disaster which the Mahama government has made of our children’s education.

Not so. Instead, the NDC’s National Chairman went to Wa to commission work on another lavish multi-million-cedi office complex for his party, while hundreds of schoolchildren in the region sat on bare floors to take study lessons. If this criminal neglect of the education of Ghanaian schoolchildren does not amount to President Mahama’s having waged a full-scale war against the future welfare and intellectual and cultural development of our country, I don’t know what else he means when Mr. Portuphy pretends as if the development of the country is all about stealing the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money and unconscionably using such moneys to build forts and castles to serve as headquarters for the ruling National Democratic Congress.

To the best of my knowledge, and most Ghanaians are apt to bear me out on this one, too, about the only political party in the country that preaches violence is the party whose leaders created the terror-mongering Azorka Boys and the PNDC Cadres, who still roam our streets and marketplaces causing mayhem and wanton destruction of lives and properties. You see, the problem with leaders like Mr. Portuphy is that these NDC Abongo Boys think that intimidating Ghanaians into a graveyard’s silence is what peace and unity in the country is all about. As well, rascals like Messrs. Portuphy, Asiedu-Nketia, Kofi Adams and Koku Anyidoho believe that badmouthing and driving out of the party intelligent and courageous young men and women like Mr. George Boateng, the former Oyarifa NDC Youth Organizer, who demand a healthy change of bad leadership for a more progressive one, is what defines party unity.

In other words, for the leaders of the National Democratic Congress, party unity means that every other rank-and-file member or supporter of the NDC ought to shut up and pretend that this most corrupt and administratively incompetent Mahama/Amissah-Arthur regime is the best thing that happened to postcolonial Ghana since 1957. Well, maybe somebody needs to inform Mr. Portuphy and his gang members that the mere absence of open conflict is no good sign of peace. Ghanaians are too sophisticated to mistake mere acquiescence – or enforced culture of silence – for the prevalence of peace and unity. We had that for 20 years under the extortionate dictatorship and pseudo-democratic tenure of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings. And guess what we got, but Mr. Rawlings’ necklace.
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