? ? ? ? ? ? I, personally, do not have much respect for his campaign tactics, but I strongly urge the vetting committee of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to reconsider its decision to withhold the certification of Mr. Paul Afoko, who is vying for the hotly contested post of General-Secretary of the party (See “Afoko’s Disqualification Is Ill-Timed – Rashid Pelpuo” Ghanaweb.com 2/16/14).
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? I do not have much regard for Mr. Afoko’s campaign tactics because it cheaply and mischievously feeds into the invidious tagging of the NPP by many a leading operative of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) as an Akan party. Not very long ago, for example, Mr. Afoko was widely quoted to be saying that his success in clinching the NPP General-Secretaryship is apt to dispell the NPP’s negative tagging as an Akan party.
Now this is very strange, in view of the fact that what is direly required of any candidate of any major political party in the country is competence, and not mere ethnicity. What is deeply troubling in this instance, however, is that the pretext for withholding the candidacy of Mr. Afoko is curiously predicated on “a petition against him by some anonymous persons.”
The identity of these anonymous accusers/petitioners ought to be promptly revealed, if only because it is the very integrity of our democratic political process that is at stake. In other words, the petitioners seeking to seriously damage and, perhaps, even scuttle the political career of Mr. Afoko ought to themselves be demonstrated to possess the requisite credibility to impugn the integrity and candidacy of the accused. More so, because Mr. Afoko is widely known to be a bona fide member of the NPP in good standing and has been so for a remarkable span of time now.
The timing of the petition is also inexpedient, and may well be a tactical ploy engineered by the enemies of the good fortunes of the NPP aimed at derailing the party’s chances at Election 2016; although it is also quite possible that Mr. Afoko’s candidacy may well have been instigated, as well as orchestrated, by the same NPP detractors.
The preceding notwithstanding, I take strong exception to Mr. Abdul Rashid Hassan Pelpuo’s rather presumptuous suggestion that, somehow, the members of the NPP’s vetting committee lack the integrity, competence and moral poise to fully appreciate Mr. Afoko’s purportedly yeomanly contribution to the welfare of the NPP. First of all, Mr. Pelpuo, who is also the Minister of Private-Sector Development, has absolutely no standing among the rank-and-file membership of the New Patriotic Party.
Then also, Mr. Pelpuo’s rather mischievous suggestion that, somehow, as a fellow northerner, Mr. Afoko ought to have been doing the bidding of the National Democratic Congress, is one that clearly indicates that the NDC is decidedly an anti-Akan political organization. It is the foregoing which makes the entire Afoko impasse strikingly reek of the incontrovertibly leery.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
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