Who cares what Mpiani thinks of Afoko?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 27, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]

The former Kufuor Chief-of-Staff is technically accurate when he asserts that Mr. Paul A. Afoko is still the National Chairman of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). However, Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani is grossly mistaken to suppose that he can casually impose Messrs. Afoko, Kwabena Agyepong and Sammy Crabbe on the 2016 Presidential Campaign of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Indeed, even as Mr. Musah Superior not quite long pointed out to the brash and brassy Asante-Jamasi/Gyamasi native, the era when Mr. Mpiani, with the tacit support of his boss, could capriciously and vindictively confer national merit honors on the bloody likes of Messrs. Kojo Tsikata, Jerry John Rawlings – the latter would preemptively reject it – John Dramani Mahama and Atta-Mills, while overtly, conspicuously and thunderously denying the same to the former NPP-MP for Akyem-Abuakwa South, are well behind us.

At best, Mr. Mpiani is nothing more than an occasional annoyance to Nana Akufo-Addo and his teeming phalanx of supporters and well-wishers throughout the country and abroad. Maybe somebody ought to remind the most unprepossessing man to be named the Chief-of-Staff of any postcolonial Ghanaian leader that Mr. Afoko is not the very first New Patriotic Party National Chairman to have been suspended by the party’s National Executive for gross misconduct. If I remember accurately, the first NPP National Chairman to be suspended from the party was Mr. Harouna Esseku, who was virulently and convulsively afforded the boot from the custom-cobbled shoes of President John Agyekum-Kufuor, for having dared to publicly assert that the Atwima-Nwabiagya native had converted the Osu Castle, then the official seat of governance, into a bribe-receiving command post.

Back then, I don’t recall anybody widely known to be associated with Nana Akufo-Addo vehemently protesting or impugning the right of the party’s leadership to reprimand and/or suspend Mr. Esseku who, by the way, was a far more emotionally and psychologically mature, dynamic, conciliatory and talented party chairman than Mr. Afoko, by any objective measure. At any rate, I am not the least bit surprised to hear Mr. Mpiani call the suspended Kyerematen shill “a fine gentleman,” because Mr. Mpiani is widely known to have generously offered coaching lessons to Messrs. Afoko, Agyepong and Crabbe on how to railroad Nana Akufo-Addo. Well, if he is deeply offended by this assertion, Mr. Mpiani can take his case to Justice Georgina Theodora Wood and see what happens. Needless to say, Mr. Mpiani has every right not to recognize the legitimacy of the suspension of these three men; but it would be equally foolhardy for the Ghana-At-50 scam-artist to suppose that his personal displeasure with the suspension of Mr. Afoko has any significance beyond his own circle of ardent Akufo-Addo detractors.

He may, indeed, have been the able Chief-of-Staff of President Kufuor, but that does not give Mr. Mpiani the right to impugn the integrity and common sense of the NPP-National Executive Council and the party’s Council-of-Elders, led by the nonagenarian and highly revered Mr. C. K. Tedam, that appended their constitutionally authorized signatures to the recommendation by the membership of the party’s Judicial and Disciplinary committees to have Chairman Afoko indefinitely suspended. Mr. Mpiani may also want to tell us a bit about how Mr. Adams Mahama, the former New Patriotic Party Chairman for the Upper-East Region, met his brutal acid-dousing death at the hands of Mr. Gregory Afoko, the Bolgatanga security coordinator – or director – of Chairman Afoko. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind, whatsoever, that like most NPP members, supporters and sympathizers, Mr. Mpiani is eager to have the New Patriotic Party return to power in the offing.

Where I have my foolproof doubt regards whether the former Kufuor Crown Prince has any credible goodwill for an Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party government. Not that it terribly matters anyhow.

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