It came as cold comfort and one that was much too little and too late to hear Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the Parliamentary Majority Leader and Me
It came as cold comfort and one that was much too little and too late to hear Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the Parliamentary Majority Leader and Member of Parliament for the Kumasi-Suame Constituency, caution party members against the regressive politics of hatred and personal destruction in the leadup to the 2024 General Election. Mr. Mensah-Bonsu is widely reported to have issued the preceding cautionary note at the ruling party’s 2021 National Delegates’ Conference in the Asante Regional Capital of Kumasi (See “Lies, Hatred Won’t Help Us – Kyei Mensah-Bonsu Cautions NPP” Modernghana.com 12/19/21).
It goes without saying that Mr. Mensah-Bonsu, who also doubles as the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, would have done himself greater good to have looked himself up in the mirror before hypocritically and self-righteously proceeding to pontifically make the statement that has been widely attributed to him. You see, this is the very prominent New Patriotic Party stalwart who put his own selfish interest ahead of the greater and long-term good of his party by literally killing off the NPP’s Parliamentary Candidate in the Nadowli-Kaleo Constituency, in the Upper-West Region, the National Democratic Congress’ stronghold and for more than 20 years the “safe seat” of the now-Speaker of Parliament, Mr. Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, to, once again, guarantee the electoral security of one of the most ideologically divisive Fourth Republican Ghanaian politicians at the expense and to the detriment of the greater long-term interest of the New Patriotic Party.
At the time of this epic and unpardonable betrayal of his own party and its fortunes, the controversial graduate of Okwawu-Nkwatia’s Saint Peter’s Secondary School, popularly known as PERSCO, presently renamed Saint Peter’s Senior High School, contended vehemently and shamelessly that the long accumulated parliamentary experience of Speaker Bagbin far outweighed and trumped any chances and the need for a rival candidate from the then-main opposition New Patriotic Party clinching or cinching the Nadowli-Kaleo Parliamentary Seat. On the latter count must also be promptly and fairly added that Mr. Mensah-Bonsu was staunchly backed by Mr. Dominic Nitiwul, the present Minister of Defense, who traveled lockstep with Mr. Mensah-Bonsu to vigorously campaign for the man who was once facetiously described as Ghana’s Parliamentary Methuselah.
Now, if this wanton and inexcusable act of heinous betrayal on the part of Messrs. Mensah-Bonsu and Nitiwul was not a veritable and irredeemable act of suicidal self-hatred against the principles and tenets of the neoliberal Danquah-Busia-Dombo political and ideological establishment, precisely what else was it? Now, couple the foregoing with the fact that the now-Speaker Bagbin was also one of the first opposition politicians to vehemently rail against the landmark and auspicious implementation of the Fee-Free Senior High School Policy Initiative, and the great danger that the Parliamentary Majority Leader poses to the fortunes of the New Patriotic Party could not be more direly imminent. Ultimately, however, the ability or capacity of the New Patriotic Party leadership machinery to break the jinx-like 8-year electoral cycle, come 2024, inheres in the willingness on the part of the movers-and-shakers of the NPP to allow disciplined democratic cultural protocol to work to its fullest logical extent and effect.
What the preceding statement means is that there is an imperative need for the grassroots membership of the party to determine which candidates get to represent the party in the 2024 General and Presidential Election. Which further means the imperative necessity for all dues-paid-up card-carrying members of the New Patriotic Party to vote in the latter party’s parliamentary primaries. The current elitist system in which only a relatively handful of party delegates get literally handpicked to determine who becomes a parliamentary candidate must effectively become a thing of the past. In 2008, it was the crassly myopic leadership of the Kufuor-Kyerematen Faction of the New Patriotic Party, truth be told, that effectively torpedoed the Presidential fortunes of the then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
You see, I have maintained time and time again that factional preferences are quite natural in any relatively humongous political establishment like the New Patriotic Party. What is significant to guard against, however, is the primitively myopic and morally unenlightened tendency for ardent party factionalists to lose sight of the imperative need to rally and quickly close up such potentially destructive internecine differences when the greater long-term good of both party and nation are at stake, especially where the political alternative clearly and inescapably is not apt to redound to both the short- and long-term benefit of the country.
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