Paa Kwesi Is No Fool, He Only Pretends

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

In the auspicious wake of the parliamentary ratification of the sale of the government’s majority shares in Ghana Telecom (GT) to the British-owned company Vodafone, the National Democratic Congress’ representative for Bawku-Central, Mr. Mahama Ayariga, was reported to have chided Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom, the presidential candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party (CPP), for summarily and abruptly disengaging himself from voting on the government’s sale of GT (“Ayariga Chides Nduom over GT” Modernghana.com 8/23/08).

Mr. Ayariga’s anger appears to have emanated from the fact that Dr. Nduom had been a vociferous tribune against the all-too-commonsensical sale of the money-guzzling GT. Needless to say, had the NDC’s Bawku-Central MP studiously followed the political career of the rump-CPP flagbearer, Mr. Ayariga would readily have been able to predict the obvious and not be superfluously blindsided by the largely opportunistic Dr. Nduom.

For starters, while from the get-go, as it were, the CPP-MP from Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem (KEEA) has publicly and flamboyantly sported his CPP credentials (or bona fides), nevertheless, Dr. Nduom’s political profile and stature have, almost exclusively, been built in the Danquah-Busia camp. Besides, as this commentator stated at the beginning of the GT debate, Dr. Nduom is a hardnosed American-trained economist and formidable entrepreneur who has spent most of his adult, and professional, life preaching and practicing thoroughgoing capitalism; and, indeed, it was through his staunch and near-fanatical espousal of Western capitalist culture that Paa Kwesi made his millions of dollars.

And here, also, must be recalled the fact that at the beginning of the heated debate on the sale of GT to Vodafone BV, this writer carped Paa Kwesi for his brash pseudo-socialist put-on, even when it was obvious to the average Ghanaian high school student of economics that a virtual boondoggle like Ghana Telecom, however “strategic” it might be deemed in theory, practically had no viable functional significance in the NPP-chaperoned onward Ghanaian march to industrial capitalism and phenomenal quality-of-life enhancement.

And, needless to say, this commentator always believed that it was just a matter of time before the real, unvarnished and hardnosed capitalist Paa Kwesi Nduom emerged out of his seductive and rabble-rousing political reverie. We also, quite aptly, predicted that if Paa Kwesi took his populist rhetoric to the floor of the Ghanaian parliament, in quixotic support of the lost cause of those playing “patriotic” games with the economic future of our country, then those of us avid observers and students of development economics would be left with no other alternative than to forcibly ensure that the “Komenda Show Boy” sought prompt psychiatric examination, before he plunged our entire National Assembly edifice into a bonfire of his political opportunism and vanity.

Of course, we need to also add, with haste, that we did not think, not even for one second, that Paa Kwesi’s political reverie and vanity had reached a clinically morbid state – this is not, in any way, to contradict our firm belief that this otherwise fine and astute entrepreneur was undesirably and untenably pushing himself, against all sound judgment, in such morbid direction. Still, we hoped against what appeared to be a situation of dire hopelessness that, ultimately, the University of Wisconsin-educated entrepreneur would come through, both for his very own good as well as the future well-being of our beloved nation.

On August 14, 2008, our prayers appeared to have been answered when, rather than reason against common sense and, perhaps, also his conscience, Dr. Nduom decided to pass up a decisive moment in Ghana’s political history by wisely choosing to walk out on the GT vote rather than go on record as one of those unpardonably irresponsible Ghanaian politicians who privileged their hulking and effete “patriotic” sentiments over and above the sound economic and cultural destiny of their country. There is, however, an ironic twist here. And the latter hinges squarely on the fact that prior to the GT parliamentary debate, Dr. Nduom had unwisely decided to play politics with our national interest by daring the wisely reticent, albeit generously forthcoming, and deliberate Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to come out openly with a definitive policy statement on the GT sale debate.

Of course, Dr. Nduom’s call came as superfluous because Nana Akufo-Addo, right from the beginning, had made his intentions crystal clear regarding the imperative need to make Ghana’s economy work the way that such giant and progressive economies as the United States, Canada, Britain, France and Germany, among a host of others, have healthily worked to guarantee a decent quality of life for their citizens. Alas, in Ghana, it woefully appears as if a sizeable chunk of our citizenry has decided to freeze itself in history, thereby unwisely rooting for the geopolitical and economic regression of our country, even while as individuals they have continued to doggedly pursue a brazen policy of “Me-tooism.” And it is precisely the latter attitude towards our collective national destiny that makes people like Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom dangerous to our seat of presidential power and influence. After all, were socialism that attractive, why has Dr. Nduom not decided to “socialize” his considerable wealth for the collective enjoyment of Ghanaians at large?

Thankfully, as Mr. Ayariga, the Bawku-Central NDC-MP eloquently attested, in the wake of the massive approval by Parliament of the GT sale to Vodafone, the CPP itself appears to have come admirably far enough, from the reckless “welfarist” days of the African Show Boy, in recognizing the limpid fact that “Socialism” – African or European – woefully lacks precisely the salutary, productive motivation that “a property-owning democracy” properly guarantees. For, the clinically morbid concept of “collective ownership” (or State Capitalism – whereby the most powerful maintain exclusive and ready access to the national dough, or wealth, never triumphed anywhere in the world, not even among the most apparently “successful” nations that practiced this epic Marxian hoax.

Needless to say, what often tends to be confused with “Socialism,” the charlatanic political theory, is “Savoir-Faire,” the civilized cultural praxis of “Noblesse Oblige,” what Dr. J. B. Danquah anticipated as a sine qua non to the triumphal execution of the ideological mode of property ownership as a means of guaranteeing the rapid socioeconomic and industrial development of largely agrarian economies like Ghana and the so-called Third World in general.

In the end, though, what is significant about the sale of Ghana Telecom (GT) is not the reported sale price of some $ 900 million – one Ghanaian journalist actually put the figure at the scandalously bizarre sum of $900 (Nine-Hundred Dollars) (see “Ayariga Chides Nduom” Modernghana.com 8/23/08). Not really; rather, it is the salutary Judeo-Christian exhortation to surgically dismember any societal institution that woefully fails to assist in remarkably enhancing the national quality of life. What is pathetic is the foolhardy pretense by the Ghanaian political opposition that, somehow, the mere ownership of Ghana Telecom by our Government was a “strategic” end in itself. The criminally derelict fact that gross mismanagement of GT had made this otherwise strategic enterprise a veritable boondoggle at the expense of the hunch-backed Ghanaian taxpayer did not seem to have mattered. Is there any wonder, therefore, that Ghanaians continue to pay the kind of murderously heavy price that we have been paying for a grossly unimaginative and unpatriotic political parliamentary opposition. For us, this is exactly what matters in Election 2008. The imperative need to weed out all the parliamentary and assembly incumbents who firmly believe it to be their divine right to ride roughshod over the collective interests of their fellow citizens.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 17 books, including “Ghanauab Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].