Opinions of Wednesday, 15 August 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
The "Mahama Loyalists" Have No Sense of History
I had intended not to involve myself in personality politics, at least not just yet, until after the Delegates Convention of the New Patriotic Party in December 2007. Unfortunately, I find this pledge to be turning out to be too dear, or expensive, to keep, particularly for a writer whose single-minded focus, at least for now, is to ensure that the NPP stays in government long enough to induce a more viable and progressive alternative than what currently parades as the political opposition.
The foregoing, in essence, explains the main objective of my recent article on the presidential candidacy of the younger brother of our beloved and substantive president, Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor. Titled “Dr. Addo-Kufuor is a Political Nuisance,” my article had nothing personal about it, except my studied, or informed, observation of our country’s political pulse and climate, although, interestingly, some readers with barely-veiled insidious agendas have tried to make a personality issue out of it.
My, undoubtedly, critical sense of matters, or take, on the preceding issue, is that gauging by the current political temperature – vote-wise – in the country, there are only two groups of people who are wont to “blindly” pushing the presidential candidacy of Dr. Kwame Addo-Kufuor, namely, fanatics and NDC diehards. Members of the latter group, incidentally, sport ethnic names from a region in Ghana that is putatively regarded as the NDC’s electoral “World Bank,” although their first devious phrase of self-introduction, a dubious disclaimer of sorts, goes something like the following: “I don’t support any political party; I simply think that President Kufuor’s brother has well-acquitted himself as Ghana’s Defense Minister, and so would do a marvelous job keeping Rawlings in check.” Their sole objective, of course, is to see the New Patriotic Party lose and lose miserably and dishonorably at the polls, thereby guaranteeing that longsuffering Ghanaians would again be visited by the NDC atrocities of yesteryear, as well as the “contract killings” of diligent and distinguished Ghanaians nowadays. And let no one make light of the latter observation: for the NDC has an unprecedented and unenviable track-record of contracting the systematic assassinations of distinguished and innocent Ghanaian citizens, including Supreme Court judges.
Needless to say, the proverbial hot-button issue or nominal code here is Mr. Rawlings, almost as if the sound and prosperous destiny of our country is squarely predicated on the mere ability of any government to keep the prematurely grizzled, increasingly incoherent and ideologically irrelevant high priest of the June 4th pseudo-revolution. And on the latter score, believe you me, dear reader, Ghana is about much, much more than the bloody Mr. Rawlings, in spite of the latter’s profoundly destructive political impact on our dear country during the last 30 years. The fanatical group of Addo-Kufuor supporters and sympathizers, on the other hand, appears to have no realistic, or practical, sense of postcolonial Ghanaian politics; and so, like their champion, they tend to naively measure presidential qualifications and qualities in terms of theory or raw reference to constitutional articles and political party regulations. Alas, in so doing, these fanatics blatantly and unwisely ignore the inescapable fact that politics is both a legal and cultural act, and particularly the fact that many an ordinary Ghanaian elector, or voter, is almost invariably guided by cultural norms and orientation, in terms of ethical, political and ideological judgments than the sheer fact of any particular presidential aspirant or candidate meeting the minimum stipulated qualifications for the presidency.
And though I am quite convinced that I made myself definitively clear in my Addo-Kufuor article, some pathologically cynical readers continue to make of my thematic focus that which it clearly was not.
For now, however, our focus is being switched onto a Ghana News Agency (GNA) news item that was posted on Ghanaweb.com on July 31, 2007. Titled “Aliu’s Election Will [sic] Prove that NPP is not Ethnic-Centered,” the aforementioned article, datelined Tamale, opened with the following lead: “Delegates to the up-coming New Patriotic Party (NPP) congress to choose a flag-bearer for the party, have been urged to elect Vice-President Aliu Mahama as the party’s presidential candidate to prove that the party is not ethnic biased.”
The foregoing statement, we are told, came from a Tamale-based group calling itself the “Loyalists of Aliu Mahama.” And for those who may not readily appreciate the geopolitical significance of Tamale in the GNA report, it bears noting in passing that Tamale, the Northern Regional Capital, is also the ethnic and political stronghold, or home-base of Vice-President Aliu Mahama.
But, perhaps, even more significant, albeit also more easily overlooked, is the fact that these “Loyalists of Aliu Mahama” do not necessarily constitute the majority of the total number of NPP delegates from Tamale to the party’s December 2007 congress who would help in electing their party’s presidential candidate for the 2008 general elections. And so just why would these Aliu Mahama “loyalists” accuse non-Dagomba or, better yet, non-northern NPP delegates who may not be inclined towards casting their ballots for Ghana’s substantive Veep of “ethnic bias,” when the very basis of the accusers’ “loyalty” to Vice-President Mahama appears to, at least, be partially predicated on the fact of these loyalists either sharing an identical ethnic background or geopolitical affinity with their political champion?
Needless to say, the problem that these so-called Loyalists of Aliu Mahama have, in terms of convincing the rest of the non-northern NPP delegates to the party’s December 2007 congress, is that electing Alhaji Aliu Mahama as NPP candidate for the 2008 presidential election would, indeed, set no political precedent in postcolonial Ghanaian history at all! For should the foregoing come to pass, it would not be the very first time that a southern, largely Akan, majority party would be either nominating or electing a northern Ghanaian as president of our great country.
Indeed, those who have avidly followed postcolonial Ghanaian political history, or are old enough to remember, may readily recall that in September 1979, Dr. Hilla Limann, the only Ghanaian premier to have earned two doctoral degrees, was elected his country’s president on the ticket of the People’s National Party (PNP), an ideological scion of the Nkrumah Corporation, otherwise known as the Convention People’s Party (CPP). And needless to say, those who know anything about Ghana’s political history are fully aware of the fact that both the New Patriotic Party, ideological descendant of the UGCC-UP, and the CPP are veritable “Southern-dominated” parties.
And to the latter effect also, those of us who have paid sedulous attention to Ghana’s postcolonial history pretty well know that in the lead-up to the country’s independence, most northern Ghanaians, by sheer accident of British colonial destiny, belonged to the erstwhile Northern People’s Party, the “original” NPP, and not to either the UGCC-UP or the CPP, although some prominent and significant leaders of northern extraction, as it were, also belonged to both the CPP and the UP.
Significantly, while there remains something remarkable to be said for Comparative Politics, both as a disciplinary course of study and casual and practical political aspiration, it is absolutely and unpardonably wrongheaded for the “Loyalists of Aliu Mahama,” to make an ideological mantra out of the historically untenable. For instance, it is not true, as the “Mahama Loyalists” would want their sympathizers to believe, that the Democratic Party of the United States of America “made” then-Vice-President Albert Gore, Jr., succeed the highly popular and then-outgoing President William Jefferson Blye Clinton; rather, it goes without saying that Mr. Gore had then acquitted himself so creditably that he readily won his party’s presidential nomination by acclamation, having also been considered by the entire Democratic Party’s national delegates to the party’s quadrennial convention to be the most winsome presidential candidate.
In sum, Vice-President Gore’s nomination as presidential candidate of the Democratic Party was effected largely by national acclamation, not by any ethnocentric Tennessee-based “Loyalists of Al Gore” group’s raving and ranting about some tribal political entitlement.
But, perhaps, the most significant lesson for anyone to learn here is the fact that merely selecting Vice-President Gore as its presidential candidate did not automatically ensure that the Democratic Party would be returned to power, as was globally witnessed in Election 2000. In fact, in a hotly and closely contested presidential election, as is likely to be the case with Ghana come December 2008 – of course, I hope not! – a vice-presidential incumbency could well become an avoidable liability. What is more, being an assistant and an occasional stand-in for a sitting president does not necessarily translate into that particular assistant becoming an effective president in turn.
Another reminder, which many critics and observers of NPP presidential politics routinely and curiously ignore, is the fact that Vice-President Aliu Mahama was personally handpicked by President John Agyekum-Kufuor as his running-mate for both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. And while, indeed, then-Presidential Candidate John Agyekum-Kufuor had selected Mr. Mahama with the counsel of the party’s executive, Veep Mahama was still Mr. Kufuor’s choice, not necessarily the “constitutional” choice of the NPP.
It is also rather morbidly embarrassing, to speak much less of the outright shameful, for the “Loyalists of Aliu Mahama” to be pointing towards post-Mandela South Africa for democratic leadership. And the least said about the latter, the better. Suffice it to remark here, in conclusion, that in terms of electoral representation in Ghana’s National Assembly, the so-called Loyalists of Aliu Mahama have little to show for their protestations.
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
