Thursday,
May 29, 2014
The NPP’s National Youth Organizer (Sammy Awuku) was
reported on Tuesday as urging the NPP leaders and followers to “stop breaking the hearts of Ghanaians”.
According to him, the NPP is a government in waiting and “Ghanaians are
looking up to us to restore hope and redeem them from the shackle of poverty
they have been plunged in by the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC)”.
(See: http://www.myjoyonline.com/politics/2014/May-27th/lets-stop-breaking-the-hearts-of-ghanaians-sammy-awuku-to-npp.php)
Although the motivation for Sammy Awuku’s utterance was the
dog-eat-dog phenomenon now threatening unity in the party, he took his audacity
too far; and I want to bring him back to his station and caution him not to mistake
high hopes for reality. It is a figment of his own fevered imagination that is
deceiving him to think that way.
The truth is that it is not the NPP that is breaking the hearts of
Ghanaians but; it is rather Ghanaians who are breaking the hearts of the NPP’s
leaders and followers.
What happened at Elections 2008 and 2012 showed that Ghanaians
knew what they were looking for and went for it. They broke the hearts of the
NPP members; not so?
The only time that we can agree that the NPP broke the hearts of
Ghanaians was when it presented a Presidential candidate who won’t win the
elections because the electorate knew who and what he was; and the
ill-considered decision of that defeated candidate to contest the results at
the Supreme Court, holding Ghanaians hostage for 8 months in 2013.
The truth told the petitioners and the entire lot of the NPP
membership by the Supreme Court broke their hearts and sent Akufo-Addo on a
so-called soul-searching vacation to heal that wound. Regrettably, he didn’t
wait for that wound to heal and has bounced back to begin doing things that
will turn that wound into a gangrene.
The goings-on in the NPP that Sammy Awuku has cited as the
substance for his utterances indicate that there is nothing new to come from
the NPP. It is the same stale story that they are weaving to tell Ghanaians at
Election 2016. How do they hope to break hearts with such a worn-out story?
I have insisted all this while that until Akufo-Addo proves that
he has learnt anything new with which to make the difference between him and
the incumbent, no amount of arm-twisting or rabble-rousing will save him from another
electoral defeat; that is, if even he is able to outdo Alan Kyerematen at the
party’s December primaries.
From what is unfolding, his insistence on going to the polls again
(when he will be 72 years old and considered as a spent horse for the race)
seems to be more of a problem for the NPP than the NDC or any of the mushroom
parties. We can tell from the daily tearing at throats in the NPP, mudslinging,
threats, plain invective, and many others feeding the cycle of internal
wranglings that the NPP can’t be the same after the December primaries.
What Sammy Awuku called “vigorous internal debates” on which the
NPP thrives is a blatant lie. What is happening in the party has nothing to do
with debates. It has much to do with personal attacks and undermining of
Kyerematen by the Akufo-Addo camp or vice versa. This kind of “do-me-I-do-you”
local politics magnifies at the national level as unproductive “rogue politics”,
which Ghanaians won’t accept. Heart-breaking is inevitable
The daily utterances from either camp is devoid of anything worth
calling “debate” but is nourished by plain verbal attacks. None seems to be
tolerating the other just because the Akufo-Addo camp is particularly bent on
browbeating Kyerematen out of contention. He has dug in and will not despair
because he knows what he has up his sleeves.
Although Dr. Konadu Apraku is not much in the fray, we know that
he is also doing his own thing on the quiet. When push comes to shove, he will
be more likely to go along with Kyerematen than with Akufo-Addo. We already
know how the NPP’s Sanhedrin has attempted cowing him into submission just
because he took the fight to Akufo-Addo.
Other interested aspirants are also doing things underground
without participating in the useless wordy warfare, hoping to emerge when the
filing of nominations begins on June 6.
In the meantime, no one in the NPP should deceive himself/herself
that Ghanaians see the NPP as any saviour or that what the NPP members do or
fail to do can break their hearts. The Mahama-led administration is finding the
going really tough, but it doesn’t mean that Ghanaians have any hope that the
NPP will redeem them. They knew why they rejected Akufo-Addo twice and can do
so when given the occasion.
I am glad that the party’s leaders have recognized that there are “loose
talkers” in the party to be brought to book: (http://www.myjoyonline.com/politics/2014/May-29th/npp-to-sanction-loose-talkers.php)
Loose talk is the fulcrum for “rogue” politics; but I wonder how a
party of loose talkers can ever sanction any loose talker in it. How will they
do their “rogue” politics, then?
I shall return…
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