Opinions of Wednesday, 28 November 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
Nduom Insults the Intelligence of Northerners
He served under the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government for two terms as a cabinet member, but last Saturday (11/17/07) Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom had the chutzpah to flatly lie to the good people of the Northern Region, and all Ghanaians of northern extraction, in general, that the Fourth-Republican Constitution of Ghana equates the personality and office of President John Agyekum-Kufuor with the ruling New Patriotic Party.
Consequently, the American-trained economist was widely reported by the Ghana News Agency, among other major Ghanaian newspapers, to be shamelessly staking the following claim: ?He [Dr. Nduom] said the 1992 Constitution allows the president to run a two term of office [sic] and that Kufuor and the NPP would be ending theirs in December 2008 to pave the way for the CPP to govern the country.?
Maybe the impudent Central Region-born political opportunist needs to be reminded upfront that the year 2007 is not the same as the years 1949 and 1956, when the Nkrumah-led Convention People?s Party hoodwinked a largely illiterate and information-deprived Ghanaian electorate into believing that the rag-tag Nkrumah Corporation possessed a magic wand with which to almost overnight convert Ghana into a mini-America politically predicated on the paradoxical ideology of pseudo-Marxist-Leninism. Needless to say, a remarkable percentage of Ghanaian voters have lived long enough to witness the blistering consequences wrought on our pates by unconscionable demagoguery.
Likewise, Paa Kwesi Nduom ought to be promptly reminded that 50 years after Ghana reasserted her sovereignty, northern Ghanaians are politically sophisticated and savvy enough to distinguish between President Kufuor as an individual and the ruling New Patriotic Party as a seminal, democratic Ghanaian ideological institution.
The again, some level-headed Cii-Pii-Pii-ites in Tamale, where he spilled such patent guff, ought to have reminded Dr. Nduom about the old saying that: ?One cannot eat one?s cake and have it, too! And for good measure, the dietary variable of Tuo Zaafi could readily substitute for Cake.
In any case, the NPP political parasite and CPP con-artist and ideological gigolo ought to have been admonished to see a psychiatrist, since he selectively and conveniently appears to have forgotten that the 9-year dictatorship of his so-called Convention People?s Party ended some 41 years ago, on February 24, 1966, and that Ghanaians are no clinical masochists to want to have CPP atrocities, untold economic waste and rank corruption revisited on them; and also that Mr. Sekou Nkrumah?s dramatic defection from the CPP into the so-called National Democratic Congress ought to give the Touche and Deloitte executive more than ample grist for serious thought.
Indeed, contrary to what Dr. Nduom would have the forward-looking Ghanaian electorate believe, no democracy-loving citizen is in the least bit mistaken by the facile binary political myth regarding governance in the Fourth Republic, supposedly, revolving around the New Patriotic Party and the so-called National Democratic Congress. And as we have pointed out time and again, any Ghanaian political party whose leadership is protected by an Indemnity Clause, illegally inserted into our Constitution, ought to have its right to contest at the polls unreservedly revoked by the people, as it makes a laughing stock of Ghanaian democracy to both well-meaning and responsible Ghanaian citizens and the international community at large.
Even more significantly, the quixotic dreamers of the rump-CPP and their allies ought to be rudely awakened to the glaring fact that Fourth-Republican political culture is not about musical chairs, whereby Ghanaians are hoodwinked into blindly predicating their destiny on the political ghosts of yesteryear, however saintly, or heroic, they may be portrayed.
One thing, however, is clear ? Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom is an unprincipled political social climber who got into the game primarily for his own private interest, even while brazenly pretending to be in dogged pursuit of the purportedly ?unfinished agenda? of the African Show Boy. Else, why does he find it so hard, after 8 years of trucking with the Kufuor Administration, to stand on his own political record? In case anybody was wondering, we darn well know exactly why; and it is simply because Paa Kwesi?s performance in the Kufuor Government was at best lackluster and spotty. Then again, what does the Komenda (KEEA) parliamentarian mean by the ?unfinished agenda? of President Nkrumah? The reintroduction of pseudo-socialist Nkrumaism, or would it be ?Nduomism? this time around? In any case, the last time that we checked, both Russia and China, the giant experimental laboratories for Marxist-Leninism were supersonically heading towards democratic capitalism, which is fundamentally not very different from Dr. Danquah?s paradigmatic concept of ?Indigenous Capitalism,? or a property-owning democracy with in-built safety valve for the protection of the poor and materially deprived.
Then also, perhaps, somebody ought to remind Paa Kwesi that on the eve of his auspicious overthrow in February 1966, President-for-Life Kwame Nkrumah had almost irreparably bankrupted Ghana?s economy. Legend even has it that then-Col. E. K. Kotoka, the progressive revolutionary who led the putsch against Nkrumah?s CPP, claimed that had he been privy to the damnable extent to which the CPP and its self-centered and god-complex leader had run our proverbial Ghanaian ship-of-state aground, he, Col. Kotoka, would have tarried a few more months in order to allow certain popular uprising to show President Nkrumah the exit door to Sekou Toure?s Guinea and Kankan Nyame (see L. H. Ofosu-Aapiah?s Lt.-Gen. E. K. Kotoka).
Then also, the myth about the CPP having bridged the gap between rich and poor Ghanaians is one darn malarkey that must be roundly debunked. After all, how many ordinary Ghanaians could purchase gold bedsteads for the Mary Akuamoahs of this world, as CPP cabinet member Mr. Krobo Edusei was able to do? And just how many average Ghanaians could win 10-percent commissions on government contracts? Or take whopping kickbacks from Kassardjian, the Armenian road contractor?
It also amounts to arrant nonsensicality for Paa Kwesi Nduom to glibly gush that his, in retrospect, unprincipled ?service? with the NPP was simply ?a call to serve Mother Ghana and that any patriotic Ghanaian would not refuse such a call.? Hey, Dr. Nduom, we have news for you ? principled Ghanaians do not truck with the arch-nemeses of their political heroes, country broke or no broke. The truth of the matter, needless to say, is that you are so deviously calculating that you were able to conveniently and shamelessly ride on the crest of the popularity of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition, thereby primping up your resume in order to enable you to prematurely take a shot at the presidency. Talk of cutting corners!
?Prematurely,? because you have not in any remarkable way, or manner, demonstrated that you can be trusted with principled and unstinted loyalty to your own CPP, let alone amply prepare yourself to confidently pilot our ship-of-state; and the latter largely explains why you rather opportunistically jumped onto the Kufuor gravy-train, while your fellow CPP journeymen and women sweated it out in the trenches. And now, like a shameless monkey, you have decided to play a ?political off-sider,? whose only objective is to deviously hog the limelight and, with the latter, clinch laurels you do not deserve, because you did absolutely nothing to engender the same.
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
