In the first part of this series, I concluded that it was a sheer waste of time and money for the party to set up another committee to probe the reasons why the party lost the 2024 elections. The first reason for this stance is that even a child born today knows that the party lost the elections because of the misconduct of Akufo-Addo and his family.
The second reason why I am opposed to this committee is that apart from being a delay tactic by those who should have resigned for leading the party into the abyss, the head of the committee—Professor Mike Ocquaye—is himself complicit in Akufo-Addo’s misrule which led to the destruction of party and country.
Being a part of the old furniture, what is the guarantee that Professor Ocquaye after wasting time and resources, is not coming to tell us cock-and-bull stories about why the party lost the elections?
In this part of my analysis, I continue with the prosecution of my case against Akufo-Addo and his cronies who, over the years, sold an incompetent person to the party and circuitously, to the country.
Even though Akufo-Addo’s grip on the party and its eventual mismanagement started long before he became the de jure leader of the party, his missteps deepened after the 2020 elections and led to the party essentially losing those elections and subsequently, the 2024 electoral calamity.
There is, in fact, a view which I cannot confirm or deny, that we lost the 2020 elections, hence the violence that characterized the elections in places like Ayawaso West Wuogon and Techiman South constituencies; many analysts believe that the party had to use force in these constituencies to stay in power in the 2020 elections.
The veracity of this claim lay in the fact that while the presidency was saved by this brute force the party used in those elections, we lost our parliamentary majority by reducing our seats from 169 to 137 and subsequently, the speakership of the legislative branch (Parliament).
Following this “near miss” in the 2020 elections which foreshadowed the 2024 elections, some of us raised red flags about Akufo-Addo’s gradual crushing of the UP tradition in his quest to empower a whole clan at crucial moments in the party’s history.
In 2021, I wrote two pieces entitled “The Coming Storm and Inevitable Split in the NPP” and “NPP on the Brink” respectively, in which I warned that the effort to impose Dr. Bawumia would potentially split the party not because Dr. Bawumia was incompetent but because of other factors.
Specifically, like most Ghanaians, I still believe that the tag of incompetence that hanged around the neck of Dr. Bawumia like the sword of Damocles during the electioneering campaign, was simply because of his association with Akufo-Addo who, for all intents and purpose, scammed the party and Ghanaians to vote for him.
I liked, and still like Dr. Bawumia, for his erudition and scholarship. As a matter of fact, as a scholar, I had cited Bawumia in one of my scholarly papers on the issue of the role of ethnicity in Ghanaian politics during his tenure at Baylor University in Texas in the United States.
Needless to say, I also like the man for his sincerity, humility, respect for fellow human beings, and his strength of character which both friends and foes can attest to.
However, I thought Dr. Bawumia’s selection as Akufo-Addo’s running mate was politically ill-advised because of the principle of seniority which had been manifested in the party’s choice of leaders over the years.
Every member of the party knew at the time of Dr. Bawumia’s selection as a running mate to Akufo-Addo that the guy was not a member of the party, let alone, the UP Tradition, which like every culture, is inculcated in individual members of the party over time.
This though should not be construed to mean that Dr. Bawumia did not contribute to the party, especially, after 2012 elections and the election petition in the court that followed those elections.
When Dr. Bawumia was selected by Akufo-Addo, the most common indictment against his selection was that apart from him not being a card-bearing member of the NPP was that his father, Alhajj Mumuni Bawumia, was a known member of the CPP and NDC, respectively, and therefore, he could not be trusted as a member of the party.
The bulk of the discussions regarding the choice of Dr. Bawumia as Akufo-Addo’s running mate took place at my Aunt (Ama Busia)’s house so I was privy to these conversations and I remember UP stalwarts like J.H. Mensah, Dan Selby etc. stood their grounds against it, so I know exactly what I am talking about here.
There is another reason why some of the NPP leaders opposed Bawumi’s selection initially. When the Northern People’s Party broke up and leaders like S.D. Dombo joined the United Party under Busia’s leadership, Dr. Bawumia’s father, Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia, joined the CPP an act which was hardly random.
Consistent with the behaviour of Bawumia’s father is a theory of a perception among some smaller ethnic groups in the country about the political dominance by the majority Akan ethnic group.
According to this theory, which I once verified with an Afro-barometer data in one of my academic papers, the smaller ethnic groups always act either individually or collectively to stave off this perceived Akan dominance.
This is one of the reasons why Dr. Bawumia struggled to make inroads in the northern regions of the country. The fact is that the minority ethnic groups in that part of the country and elsewhere could not entrust him with the presidency because of his association with a party with deep roots in the land of the Akan majority.
Thus, for someone like Bawumia jumping the queue ahead of leading members of the party like Alan Kyeremanten who had not only toiled to finance party offshoots like the Young Executives over the years was going to be a hard sell to the party rank and file.
Besides not being a card-bearing member of the party at the time he partnered with Akufo-Addo, Bawumia’s selection was a clear breach of the gentleman’s agreement made at the University of Ghana’s Party Congress in 2007 between Akufo-Addo and Alan Kyeremanten when the latter stepped down for the former during the second round of the leadership contest.
Moreover, the Danquah-Busia-Dombo tradition is a triumvirate of Ashantis, Akyems, Bonos, and Ahafos concerning its electoral strength. Thus, the dropping of Alan Kyeremanten by the Kyebi Mafia arguably amounted to a slap in the face of Asantes and Bonos, especially, Bonos who form the bulk of the Busia bloc in the party.
Based on this apparent discrimination against Asantes and Bonos who constitute the bulk of the party’s electoral strength by the newly-empowered Akyems, I wrote an article in 2021 titled, “Why Bonos and Ahafos must leave the NPP”, imploring the Bonos and Ahafos to rethink their continued membership of the party as there was a deliberate glass ceiling against them.
My point in this article was that apart from the exclusion of Busias from Akufo-Addo’s appointments, the NPP no longer represented the values and interests Kofi Abrefa Busia stood for in his politics.
Akufo-Addo’s eight years in power witnessed the compromising of the exemplary behavior characteristic of members of the party past and present and the systemic discipline that was always the sine qua non of this proud political tradition.
Without mincing words, the Danquah-Busia-Dombo political tradition now has in its midst elements of unprintable characters, charlatans, and agitators who do not imbibe the fine principles, beliefs, and traditions that set the party apart from other parties in Ghana’s political firmament.
When did somebody like Gabby Otchere-Darko become a member of the NPP to be referred to as a “……leading member of the NPP?” Nothing turns me off than this characterization of Gabby Otchere-Darko.
To add insult to injury, these charlatans by their sheer numbers, succeeded in displacing the voices of reason in the party by capturing the levers of power from the branch to the national levels, all at the bidding of Akufo-Addo who used such characters to do his dirty works.
The modus operandi of this group at the constituency level was to impose candidates on the people at the local level simply because “Nana Akufo-Addo could not work with opposing candidates….”
How would somebody like Akufo-Addo who said it on national TV that as children he and his siblings “never slept at Kyebi, their hometown because they were city dwellers”, know about the problems in the mainly rural constituencies in the country to choose their leaders for them?
These uncouth behaviors of these Akufo-Addo operatives at the local level were some of the reasons why the party lost its parliamentary majority literally and figuratively, the presidency; the accompanying chaos logically led to a total breakdown in party discipline.
To ensure the protection of personal parochial interests, these executives working in tandem with some MPs who had overstayed their political welcome in some constituencies, engaged in all kinds of shenanigans.
Specifically, some MPs who had earned the nicknames “Mugabe” because of their long stay as MPs colluded with their handlers in the Akufo-Addo administration to disqualify competent candidates who could win their constituency seats for the party, especially, in the Berekum West, Dormaa Central, Wenchi, Sunyani East and West constituencies.
One such example was the disqualification of Bernard Oduro Takyi (BOT), in the Sunyani West constituency in the Bono region. The net result of the manipulations in that constituency was that BOT went Independent, was expelled from the party, and the party lost one excellent and eloquent member.
BOT eventually joined the NDC and has been a thorn in the NPP’s flesh ever since, while the incumbent MP went on to lose the seat to the NDC in the 2024 elections.
At the height of the 2024 campaign, it was always a delight to watch BOT on YouTube and other media with the young man’s incisive analyses of national and local issues, while those who hounded him out of the party were busy accumulating unexplained wealth at the expense of their parliamentary duties.
Who are we kidding as a political party? Many sensible, but side-lined members of the party in some regions and constituencies spoke against these manipulations of the electoral albums through the monetization of the politics which the Akufo Addo bandwagon had taken to unassailable heights because of the widespread theft that took place under his nose.
In the melee that followed the messy primaries preceding the elections, such prominent members of the party as J.A. Kufuor and Hon. Kennedy Agyapong drew attention to the dire consequences of such undemocratic antics by some of these leaders, but to avail.
However, because the national executives acquiesced in this noise at the constituency and regional levels, they failed to give this warning the traction it needed to stop it and the end state was the abysmal performance of the party in the 2020 elections and subsequently, the 2024 elections.
What is lamentable about this behavior in the lead-up to the 2020 elections is that the history of what happened in 2008 was there to guide the party since this was simply a mirror image of what happened in 2008.
In 2008, the party’s reaction was to institute the Heymann Committee to come up with the reasons for the party’s abysmal performance at the polls in 2008. In 2020 instead of another “Heymann Committee”, the entire national executive took to the road to ostensibly learn about what they clearly knew was the reasons for the party’s poor performance in the elections.
Today, we shamelessly have the “Mike Ocquaye Committee” to do the same post-mortem; in any normal democratic country, this collective should have resigned for failing the party.
The message the constitution of this committee is sending to the party’s rank and file, and in fact, the entire country is that Akufo-Addo is still in charge of the party.
Already, we know that Akufo-Addo has pushed his attack dogs to the front benches of the 9th parliament to give them the national exposure they need to leverage their future influence in the “reorganized’ NPP we are yearning for.
In conclusion, the party’s failure to capture the imagination of the Ghanaian electorate in the December election was a function of Akufo-Addo’s indifference and his firm grip on the party which rendered members impotent in criticizing his wayward behaviors.
The so-called Mike Ocquaye Committee is a conduit for Akufo-Addo to continue to “rule from the grave” and must therefore be declared dead on arrival in the efforts to reform and reorganize the NPP.
The best way forward in these efforts to reform the party is for the rank and file to see through these ploys and jettison the influence of Akufo-Addo and the Kyebi Mafia through the dissolution of the Mike Ocquaye committee and side-line the newly-elected Akufo-Addo Parliamentarians who are being prepared to continue the loot they enjoyed under their master’s rule.
Acheampong Yaw Amoateng, PhD, is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University, Fiapre, Bono Region (I write in my capacity as a founding member of the NPP).
The post The Crushing of the UP Tradition by the Akufo-Addo Juggernaut: PART 2 appeared first on MyNewsGh.
