Calls by party stalwarts for President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to reshuffle his cabinet operatives and ministerial appointees may be long overdue (
Calls by party stalwarts for President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to reshuffle his cabinet operatives and ministerial appointees may be long overdue (See “Reshuffle Ministers, Bring in Fresh Energies to Address Complacency, Impunity in Our Party – Volta NPP Group Tells Akufo-Addo” Modernghana.com 4/13/22). But, of course, it equally goes without saying that any decision to reshuffle ministerial and other executive appointees must be squarely based on the performance record and the auspiciously strategic objective and mission by the party establishment to ensure the stability and long-term development of the country.
Indeed, even as the leadership of the Volta Regional Recourse Group of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) recently had cause to soberly admonish the government, complacency is the last political culture and behavioral trait that the national leadership of the NPP would want to entertain or indulge in the watershed leadup to the 2024 General Election. And you can bet your proverbial bottom-dollar that the operatives of the NPP are notorious for being pathologically afflicted with an acute case of complacency that unarguably resulted in the present unprecedented Hung Parliament of which this second Akufo-Addo Administration is avoidably afflicted.
Avoidably afflicted because the performance of the New Patriotic Party in the four years leading up to the 2020 General Election ought to have rather resulted in an exponential increase in the number of parliamentary seats won by the party. It was definitely the sinister spirit of complacency that ensured that a political beehive of nation-wrecking apparatchiks of the faux social democratic establishment of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) would have a bumper harvest of parliamentary seats in the aftermath of the 2020 General Election. It was clearly not the performance record of the National Democratic Congress over the course of the previous 8 years that so shockingly and, some would even say, scandalously tilted the parliamentary slot of the 2020 General Election in favor of the thoroughly discredited Mahama Posse.
Rather, it was the inescapable disaffection of Ghanaian voters with the smug and cavalier attitude of a sizeable percentage of the leadership of the New Patriotic Party that ensured that the heydays of parliamentary and legislative rubber-stamping of ruling party policies, regardless of merit, would conclusively become a veritable relic of the past. Fortunately, at the presidential level, an overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters wisely recognized the fact that returning a criminally unconscionable and morally regressive leader like Mr. John “Kwame Gonja Ouagadougou Akonfem-Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama to power could very well spell an eternal economic doom for the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, and with the latter, unarguably the very end of postcolonial Ghanaian civilization.
You see, the last thing that any people hungry for cutting-edge modern industrial and technological development would want to be revisited with or by is the sort of stygian darkness of thoroughgoing energy crisis, globally and infamously known as “Dumsor” which effectively characterized the unprecedented four-and-half years during which Mr. Mahama smugly and cavalierly presided over the affairs of some 30-million-plus Ghanaian citizens. It was the longest journey through the Biblical Hell, literally speaking, and one that apocalyptically mirrored the currently unspeakable torrents of genocidal atrocities being visited or revisited by the good people of The Ukraine by Russian ethnic nationalist leader Vladimir Putin, reckoned in terms of economic losses and strangulation.
Now, what clearly needs to be done, if it has already not been done, is for the executive operatives of the New Patriotic Party in all 16 regions of the country to immediately confer and draw up a list of salient problems militating against the capacity of the party to break the apparent and putative jinx that has ominously ensured that the New Patriotic Party establishment would equally and evenly alternate governance tenures or electoral terms with a scandalously regressive and kleptocratic beehive of impenitent and pathologically self-infatuated political scumbags as the operatives of the National Democratic Congress. Such emergency confabulation could be systematically scaffolded or held in gradation from the district to the regional levels, and then, ultimately, at the national level. This is also where the ministerial portfolio of policy monitoring becomes even more significant in terms of its duplication or spread across all levels of the party’s institutional establishment.
In short, what is clearly been proposed, advocated or suggested here is that local policy monitoring organs or structures be established at the district and regional levels of the party, with the officials in charge of these local policy monitoring organs or structures being answerable to the Minister of Policy Monitoring resident at the Presidency or located at the party’s National Headquarters. Regular performance review of all positions of public trust ought to be made imperative, if qualitative administrative performance is to be ensured at all levels of our collective national endeavors, not just at the ministerial or cabinet level, although such regular performance monitoring and reviewing or evaluation is unarguably of utmost significance.
That such call is coming from the New Patriotic Party’s Volta Regional “Recourse” Group Leaders – I assume this to be a group of political strategists – makes it even more significant, if also because it also comes as very refreshing, knowing what the traditionally stereotypical relationship between the New Patriotic Party’s establishment has been vis-à-vis the overwhelming majority of the residents and inhabitants of this part of the country. It also shows that perhaps things are dramatically beginning to change for the better from the former stereotypical posture of entrenched mutual suspicion and perennial hostility, largely on the part of the subethnic Anlo-Ewe Trokosi Nationalists of the region, to one of progressive and unreserved acceptance and recognition of our mutually inextricable and eternally interlinked destinies as one family of earthlings.
What this further means is that ideological differences, or whatever might have been perceived as such in the past, are fast receding into the gray margins of practical irrelevance and in place of the latter the supplantation of salutary upsurge or resurgence of progressive thinking of a sort that prioritizes and foregrounds the greater collective good of our nation-state above all else.
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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
April 13, 2022
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com
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