Prof. Oquaye ought not to apologize for the collapse of CPP

I have not had time to listen to the entirety of his Ghana@60 lecture, presented at the National Theater, so I cannot make any definitive statement or draw any sweeping conclusions one way or another (See “Ghana@60 Lecture: Oquaye Was a Shadow of a Professor - Mornah” Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/7/17). One thing that I can say for certain, though, is that it is pointless for any New Patriotic Party (NPP) leader or stalwart to pretend as if the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) could become a viable ideological alternative to the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Former President John Agyekum-Kufuor also made the same mistake during his 8-year tenure, when he brought Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom into his cabinet in hopes of facilitating the institutional strengthening of the Nkrumaist group, with the rather bizarre hope that the rump-CPP could then swallow up the Rawlings-minted juggernaut and cause the NDC to rapidly and effectively recede into oblivion. That trend of thinking could not be more at once grossly miscalculated and scandalously naïve. The fact of the matter is that both the rump-Convention People’s Party and the National Democratic Congress are Leftist ideological clones and mirror images of each other.

But even more significantly, the history of the Nkrumah-leaning CPP clearly indicates that it is far more dangerous in practice than the National Democratic Congress could ever hope to be, the latter’s equally bloody history notwithstanding. That the Nkrumaist group split into six turf-warring parties, has absolutely nothing to do with the NDC’s having deviously and strategically stampeded the rump-CPP and its other breakaway components onto the gray margins of opposition political culture. It is simply part and parcel of the incurable and pathological narcissism of the heirs of President Kwame Nkrumah’s megalomania. The key NDC operatives are relatively more skillful at rallying to grab power than their rump-CPP and PNC and PPP counterparts, among others, primarily because of the sort of focused military-type discipline brought to bear on the rank-and-file membership of the NDC by the party’s Founding-Father, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings.

But all of this is apt to radically change in the very near future, and the curious ideological stance taken by erudite and needlessly sympathetic Danquah-Busia-Dombo democrats like Speaker Michael Aaron Oquaye is more likely to slow down the logical disintegration of the NDC than hasten the same. Whichever way one looks at it, the temper of our times does not lend itself to the governance of our country by either the rump-Convention People’s Party or the National Democratic Congress. We just witnessed the predatory activities and reckless potshot or unreflective policies of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress nearly plunge the country into Stone-Age Civilization. A follow-up by the kleptocratic counterparts of the r-CPP could only take Ghana into an even more regressive level of economic development.

There can be no gainsaying that the country requires a more formidable and politically progressive opposition than currently prevails. But this has absolutely nothing to do with the remarkable success of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition. It is simply that the astute founders and inspirational fonts of the New Patriotic Party were far more visionary and ideologically pragmatic and progressive than their faux-leftist Nkrumaist counterparts and inveterate detractors.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. English Department, SUNY-Nassau Garden City, New York August 15, 2017 E-mail: [email protected]