The Defeat Of The NPP And What It Portends For The Future Of The Party

BY SAMUEL ADJEI SARFO

The defeat of the NPP may have come as a surprise to those caught in the drunken stupor of Ghana’s power politics, but to those star-gazers of the national political firmament, the writing was long inscribed in the skies. The fundamental reason for this defeat is the blatant assault on the democratic tenet within the party machinery itself. The NDC learnt a bitter lesson when it sought to impose parliamentary candidates on its members in the constituencies: the party kissed the dust of defeat in the 2000 elections. In 2008, true to the axiom that people learn nothing from history, the NPP sought to replicate the failed method of the NDC by imposing candidates on members in the various constituencies.

A typical modus operandi of the party hierarchy was to put in place a Machiavellian process whereby any challenger to an old guard or sitting MP was hamstrung or eliminated at the initial stages of the nominating process in order to pave the way for a party favorites to be declared unopposed. In this instance, democratic principles which have endured since the party’s founding was jettisoned out of the window and a bastardized process substituted in its place to ensure a controlled outcome that favored those deemed as the Party’s hereditary princes.

A particular scenario that typified this travesty of democracy played out in the New Juaben North Constituency. There, Hackman Owusu Agyemang successfully hijacked the democratic principle by imposing himself on the people. After his failed bid to secure the presidential nomination, Hackman returned to the constituency and began his machination to steal the parliamentary nomination. He led a protest march against his main opponent, Dr Samuel Annor on the spurious allegation that Annor did not resign his position as Regional Treasurer before filing his nomination papers for the New Juaben parliamentary contest. Against all evidence to the contrary, Hackman succeeded in getting the party machinery behind him, and by a blatant act of political deceit, he assembled his henchmen to coronate him as unopposed. This he did at a time when opposing delegates were in Accra for a court hearing about his illegal nomination. All this happened last June, 2008 when I visited Ghana. Concerned about this mockery of democracy, I organized a demonstration against the fake declaration of Hackman Owusu Agyemang as unopposed parliamentary candidate for the New Juaben North. I only wanted democratic principle to prevail, and hoped that a level playing ground would be facilitated for the people to nominate any candidate of their choice.. The response of Hackman Owusu Agyemang, together with Nana Adjei Boateng, Municipal Chief Executive, was to send over three hundred members of the police force to break up our legitimate demonstration. The police action was so reckless in nature and dangerous in form that I still consider it a miracle that nobody was killed or hurt. I was a Ward Chairman of Effiduase in the year 2000. I worked tirelessly in that year to ensure that these two men got their position. I supported them in any way I knew how before leaving the country in 2002. Because I disagreed with them, they willfully and purposely displayed bestial power to have me crushed together with other NPP foot soldiers who put them where they were. Our crime was that we were asking for the democratic principle to prevail. If the cohorts of Rawlings had come down upon any demonstration we held with that horde of power, it would not have surprised me in the least; but coming as it were from my own NPP members whom I personally knew, I was extremely shocked and disillusioned. When I left Ghana in July of 2008, I knew that love for power had changed my party’s concept of democracy: the term had become an expression of mere convenience for the NPP hierarchy, and that whenever it suited their purposes, the party was more prone than the NDC to sacrifice its democratic principles….

All over Ghana , a scenario such as the one in New Juaben North played out in the various constituencies. The democratic principle by which the Danquah-Busia tradition had always prided itself was thrown to the dogs. Self-appointed princes of the NPP, mostly made up of the old guards, shut the door on the face of the new guards, or told them to join the last spot in an imaginary dynastic queue which the old guards conveniently constructed for themselves and their cronies. The NPP became the personal property of a few selected ones who regaled Ghanaians with fictional narratives of their achievements in the formation of the party. Those who dared to disagree with them were branded as insurgents and dismissed from the party, and those who had the good sense to resign were told good riddance. Hackman Owusu Agyemang captured the renegade mood within the party hierarchy when he implied of Kyeremanteng’s resignation that the party had lost better men than Kyeremanteng and still survived; therefore Kyeremanteng should not be “begged” to return to the party.

On hindsight, such undemocratic tenets and infantile vituperations may sound absurd and cavalier, a phonic byte emanating from a party bent on losing an election it was destined to win. But in the heat of passion of an over-confident executive, the signs of defeat was never seen or even imagined, and the murmuring of public discontent transformed in their ears into empty rhetoric of the malcontent. Of strange significance was how Nana Akuffo Addo himself failed to stem the tide of tyranny unleashed by the party executive. Macmanu is and will always be a lumpen moron whose actions are true to form, but I knew and admired Nana Akuffo Addo as a man capable of becoming the country’s philosopher king. In 1996, during my student years at the University of Cape Coast, I was campus Branch Chairman of NPP. We organized for then presidential candidate Kufuor to visit campus. After I delivered a speech, Akuffo Addo stood up and unabashedly declared that he did not know how to replicate the quality of my speech and delivery. Flattered beyond measure, I became his staunch supporter and acolyte. However, my misgivings about his leadership style gave as I observed him preside over the failure of the party’s democratic structures that has now led to the present defeat. The crowning moment of my disgust lies in the fact that he attempted to carry the party to the precipice of opprobrium by shady dealings after the elections. What was the strange court action and failure to concede meant to achieve?

Akuffo-Addo’s post-election posturing can only be interpreted as the party’s further parting of ways with its core democratic principles. What happened within the party’s internal body politic is bursting forth into the national politics: a candidate is defeated in an election and he thinks it lies within his power to reverse the will of the people…..Such stupid assumptions come from the Rawlings era, where moon gazers still believe that it lay in Rawlings’ power in 2000 to repudiate the will of the people. Such untrammeled power has never lain with anyone in Ghana. The voice of the people is the voice of God, and President Kufuor and Mr. Da Rocha, both astute politicians, know better than to imagine for a minute that the outcome of the elections could be reversed by any man……….

To borrow Akuffo-Addo’s own words, the 2008 election was NPP’s to lose, and the party gurus have worked very hard to lose it. The only thing left is for the party to spare the nation a quagmire . It can do so by quickly moving to concede defeat. The second task is for the NPP to work to re-invent itself through the restoration of its democratic principles. Without it, we are nothing more than others who display perennial disrespect and resentment for democracy. The task of remaking the party is best achieved by an initial acceptance that the Party goofed big-time in abandoning its core democratic principles. These principles can be restored if we part ways with the archaic notion that the Party belongs to a group of dotards who have the authority to open or shut the door of privilege to others, or to stifle the voice of the people by perpetuating themselves in power.

If the party admits its errors and lays the blame where it belongs, the NPP can return to power in the next elections. On the other hand, if we fail to acknowledge this overarching reason for our party’s defeat- if we construct fake and bizarre narratives for our present plight, then those old guards have seen the last of an NPP presidency in their lifetimes.

Samuel Adjei Sarfo studies law in Houston, Texas. You can reach him at [email protected].