The Road to Kigali –Part 5

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

Among the Akan majority populace of Ghana, and the Ivory Coast, we have a maxim that runs as follows: “When Mr. Naked promises you a bolt of cloth, just listen to his name.” The foregoing maxim pretty much sums up Dr. Tony Aidoo’s rather intemperate, albeit clearly and pathetically vacuous, call for the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) to be summarily banned from the Ghanaian political arena and culture, merely because some key operatives of the NPP, including the latter’s Election 2012 presidential candidate, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, have dared to demand a recount of the vote, solidly based on the strength of forensic evidence indicating the massive rigging of Election 2012 in favor of Caretaker-President John Dramani Mahama (See “I Wish NPP Were Banned from Ghanaian Politics – Tony Aidoo” Modernghana.com 12/10/12).

For demanding electoral, or democratic, justice, Dr. Aidoo, who serves as the policy monitoring and evaluation wonk in the office of President Mahama, wants the global community to envisage the New Patriotic Party as a political outlaw. Well, I have news for those cynics and unsuspecting observers of the Ghanaian political scene who would rather facilely have Ghana mislabeled as a “Model African Democracy.”

Needless to say, like many a fledgling Third-World democracy, Ghanaian democracy is still a work in the rough, a work in progress that is nowhere near the status of a “Model Democracy,” at least not as long as the blood-stained National Democratic Congress (NDC) remains a formidable force on our national political landscape.

At any rate, I don’t know just what he means, when the former Cape Coast University social scientist asserts that the “conduct of the NPP for the past four years, if not checked, could plunge the country into a civil war.” Well, for those of our readers who have not been studiously following events during the past four years, the NPP has epically been able to expose the hitherto unprecedented behind-the-scenes racket in which Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, a well-known financier of the National Democratic Congress, was fraudulently gifted a humongous GH? 52 million belonging to the Ghanaian taxpayer, on the pretext of him having been illegally and flagrantly denied a contractual payment by the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party government for work that, as it objectively turns out, was never even awarded, let alone performed.

What is significant to observe here, though, is that in the lead-up to Election 2012, President Mahama publicly vowed to force Mr. Woyome to return his pelf to our national coffers. Instead, during the second presidential debate, sponsored by the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), Mr. Mahama would be heard heartily congratulating Mr. Woyome for criminally duping the Ghanaian taxpayer, while self-righteously faulting the Kufuor government for having facilitated the Woyome caper. And so it is not quite clear exactly what he means, when Dr. Aidoo calls the key operatives of the NPP “intellectual bigots.”

The prime peeve of the Mills-Mahama watchdog appears to be that, somehow, the NPP has created an unsavory habit of griping about just about any general election in which they have been declared the loser. Well, maybe somebody ought to remind the obviously amnesiac Dr. Aidoo that the late President John Evans Atta-Mills made quite a lengthy career of vehemently protesting his decisive electoral defeats at the hands of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor in 2000 and, again, in 2004 and on countless occasions threatened to go to court in order to have Mr. Kufuor’s victories overturned. On either two occasions, I don’t remember either President Kufuor or any major figure of the New Patriotic Party calling for the immediate proscription of the then-opposition National Democratic Congress, or the summary disqualification of the then-former Vice-President Mills from contesting in any future general election.

And so when Dr. Aidoo arrogantly asserts that “the NPP are bad losers; their repetitive conduct of bringing the electoral process into disrepute could plunge the country into a civil war,” he might just as well have been preaching to the proverbial choir or soliloquizing.

As for his rather curiously pontifical slamming of his main political opponents as being “intellectual bigots” who have absolutely no remarkable appreciation of constitutional democracy, maybe Dr. Aidoo ought to be reminded of the fact that the founding-father of the National Democratic Congress is the former Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, a certified “revolutionary” butcher and brazen usurper of a democratically elected government, and not either Dr. J. B. Danquah, the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, or Prime Minister K. A. Busia.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Dec. 15, 2012
###