The dilemma over whether the New Patriotic Party (NPP) should or should not contest the three parliamentary seats presently held by the “Nkrumah Corporation” – otherwise known as the Convention People’s Party (CPP) – is one that must be critically reexamined within the practical context of both political reality and the zero-sum-game that is the veritable ideology of Nkrumaism.
The seats in question are Evalue-Gwira, Ellembele and Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abrem. The latter seat is of especial interest and significance, in view of the fact of its holder having played quite a remarkable role in the NPP’s bid to thoroughly and constructively overhauling Ghana’s system of public bureaucracy.
Then there is also the equally significant and collaborative role of CPP stalwart Mr. Freddy Blay, who has served as First-Deputy Speaker of Parliament under NPP dispensation.
And, indeed, while the preceding cases are not unprecedented in advanced democracies and, in fact, salutary in terms of the fact that such collaboration foregrounds national development, as opposed to pure political partisanship, nevertheless, if unnecessarily prolonged, it may yet contribute to the establishment of an unsavory entitlement tradition that may nightmarishly haunt the more generous partner in the long run. And here, of course, the allusion is to Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom’s evidently uneasy and short-lived partnership with the government of the New Patriotic Party.
Needless to say, while he, indeed, appears to have quite creditably acquitted himself as Minister of Public Sector Reform, particularly vis-à-vis the $ 547 million-dollar Millennium (actually “Millennial”) Challenge Account Compact, ideologically speaking, Dr. Nduom, an American-trained entrepreneur who recently resigned his cabinet portfolio, never felt quite at home in the Kufuor Administration. And for those of us who avidly followed the mainstream political career of the CPP-Member of Parliament for Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abrem (KEEA), it became increasingly clear that the man primarily opted to serve in the NPP government more as a stepping-stone – or launching pad – to vault his barely veiled presidential ambitions, as it must, indeed, have grimly dawned on him that the Nkrumah Corporation might never regain the enviable reins of governance in Fourth-Republican Ghana in his lifetime. In the preceding sense, then, Dr. Nduom came to be aptly perceived as a brazen political opportunist, just as his ideological hero and patriarch, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, had been in his mercurial relationship with the leadership of the seminal United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC). On this score, therefore, the question of whether Dr. Nduom resigned his post of his own volition – or accord – or perhaps was, literally, pushed out by Ghana’s Chief-of-State, is hardly of any moment. For like his Marxist-oriented patriarch, Dr. Nduom, a veritable capitalist entrepreneur in practice, came to the proverbial table with a game-plan and, so far, the Edina-Boy has done himself a lot of good.
Source: GhanaWeb
