Not What You Say, Alan, But What You Do...

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

Garden City, New York

Sept. 19, 2014

E-mail: [email protected]

Not that it makes much of any difference, anyhow, but when Mr. Alan Kyerematen tells delegates of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) that he does not hate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, I would rather wish that the former Kufuor Trade Minister really hated the former Kufuor Attorney-General and Minister of Justice with a vengeance (See "Alan: I Don't Hate Akufo-Addo" Starrfmonline.com 9/14/14).

He claims to be engaged in a healthy power-grab competition with the former NPP-Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa South, but his track-record speaks otherwise. His tantrum throwing and arrogant walkout and summary vacation of his membership of the New Patriotic Party in 2008 were neither symptomatic of a healthy political slugfest nor collegial affection for the man who twice defeated Alan Cash, as Mr. Kyerematen is popularly known, in the latter's febrile bid for the presidential candidacy of the New Patriotic Party.

In 2012, Mr. Kyerematen, in the predictable wake of his defeat for the party's presidential nomination by Nana Akufo-Addo, this time around, tactically decided to stay outside the country for most of the campaign season, in clear refusal to actively participate in the Akufo-Addo presidential campaign. Neither did Mr. Kyerematen do any remarkable campaigning for the promotion of the greater and general fortunes of the party. He has also continued to insolently claim that he had a better shot at the presidency in 1996 than the giant likes of Messrs. John Agyekum-Kufuor and Kwame Pianim.

In other words, what Alan Cash is claiming here is that he had a far better chance of trouncing the then-incumbent President Jerry John Rawlings at the polls in 1996 than did Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor. He has yet to back this comical assertion with polling facts and figures. But for yours truly, what is inexcusably insulting is Mr. Kyerematen's assertion that in opting advisably out of Election 1996, he had actually performed a "supreme sacrifice" for the collective interest and destiny of the New Patriotic Party.

I don't suppose that by the preceding assertion, Alan Cash presumed to comfortably rank himself among the immortalized likes of Dr. J. B. Danquah and Messrs. Koi-Larbi, Ebenezer Ako-Adjei and Emmanual Obetstebi-Lamptey. I suppose what I am traumatically struggling with here is Mr. Kyerematen's concept and interpretation of what constitutes a "supreme" and/or "ultimate" sacrifice. His imperious sense of presidential entitlement is one that is at once absurd and indisputably alien to the sort of robust and civilized postcolonial and modern democratic culture being doggedly pursued by the Ghanaian citizenry at large.

Of course, Mr. Kyerematen is entitled to his own oversized sense of self-importance. What he is not entitled to, by any measure or stretch of democratic tenets and principles, is his apparent belief that he has a bounden obligation to, somehow, impose himself and his power-grab ambitions on the rank-and-file membership of the New Patriotic Party. His obstinate refusal to rally behind the most forensically winsome presidential candidate of the NPP, on the vacuous grounds of Nana Akufo-Addo's having failed to clinch the presidency on two previous occasions, is just that - comically vacuous.

Yes, comically vacuous because on both occasions Mr. Kyerematen had been a loud-talking contestant. He has also done absolutely nothing to restrain the boorish deployment of personal attacks on Nana Akufo-Addo by his assigns and hirelings, even while paradoxically crying foul at fairly calibrated reprisals deftly and sagaciously deployed by Akufo-Addo supporters and sympathizers.