He is a major and prominent historian and a respected public intellectual, as well as a staunch key operative of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).
He is a major and prominent historian and a respected public intellectual, as well as a staunch key operative of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). So, when Prof. Richard Amoako-Baah expresses concern over what the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) academician terms as the politically suicidal behavior of the group calling itself the “BAWUS,” that is, supporters of Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, Prof. Amoako-Baah must definitely know what he is talking about (See “Call Your Supporters to Order – Prof. Amoako-Baah Advises Bawumia” Modernghana.com 7/7/21).
Unfortunately, the prolific critic and party insider misses the boat completely, as it were, when the American-trained historian glaringly ignores the fact that the BAWUS did not just pop out of the blue with its purportedly politically suicidal behavior or misbehavior. To be certain, theirs is part of a long-standing tradition within the New Patriotic Party and one that goes at least relatively as far back as 1999, when the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo lost the party’s Presidential Nomination or Presidential Candidacy to Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor.
Back then, we have been reliably informed, supporters of the then-Candidate John Agyekum-Kufuor unwisely and politically regressively resorted to taunting the supporters of a defeated Nana Akufo-Addo, when what ought to have really occurred then was for both factions within the party to have wisely and constructively rallied together to ensure that Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor would clinch victory for the entire party and its membership in the December 2000 Presidential Election. Which Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor won all right but not with the seismic margin of the sort of electoral landslide that had been widely expected, in view of the abjectly poor performance record of the Jerry John Rawlings-led regime of the National Democratic Congress.
At any rate, what needs to be especially highlighted here is the fact that in 2008, with barely four months to that year’s Presidential Election – actually General Election – when he scandalously and divisively resigned his membership of and from the New Patriotic Party, foremost among the grievances that a presidential-primary defeated Candidate Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen cited for his decision to abandon the party, was that his supporters were being unhealthily antagonized by the supporters and sympathizers of the triumphant Candidate Akufo-Addo to an extent that made it practically inadvisable for the two major factions of the New Patriotic Party to amicably work together for the direly craved victory of both the NPP and its 2008 Presidential Candidate.
As I vividly recall, at the time, somebody calling himself the Spokesperson for the supporters and sympathizers of the then-Candidate Akufo-Addo publicly retorted that in 1999, in the wake of his defeat by Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor in the New Patriotic Party’s Presidential Primary, the supporters and sympathizers of the proverbial “Little Man from Kyebi” had not packed bag and baggage and exited the party the way that Mr. Kyerematen and his followers and big-time backers had done, coup-d’état fashion, with barely four months to the 2008 General Election. In other words, for his argument and criticism to be deemed unassailably credible and relevant, Prof. Amoako-Baah must forthrightly admit that the Trade and Industry Minister has not always been a progressive party stalwart through and through.
And then party key players and leaders could be reasonably and constructively prevailed upon to organize sensitivity-training workshops for party footsoldiers, so-called, in an indispensable effort to galvanize, educate and enlighten these core party members on the imperative need for the New Patriotic Party to clinch victory and retain power beyond 2024, if Ghana’s remarkable economic recovery and industrial renaissance and our national development as a civilization and a people are to steadily inch closer to full and enviable realization.
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