Party Laws Are Not Etched in Stone or Steel, Asah-Asante

The most pressing issue for both the leadership of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the latter institutional establishment, contrary to what Legon Political Scientist, Dr. Kwame Asah-Asante, would have the rest of us believe, is not the selection of the 2024 Presidential Running-Mate of Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia. Rather, it is about how to make the New Patriotic Party far more electorally fetching or attractive to the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s electorate than it is presently (See “Dr. Asah-Asante cautions Bawumia over delayed selection of running mate for 2024 election” Modernghana.com 4/22/24).

Now, what it means by making the New Patriotic Party far more fetching to the electorate includes being able to quickly resolve the apparent relapse of the cancerous problem of Dumsor, which seriously threatens to vitiate or significantly wear away the sharp national-development edge that seven years of the sterling performance of the lame-duck Akufo-Addo Administration has achieved over and above the previous Mahama-led ragtag regime of the National Democratic Congress, the putative “Party of Impossibilities,” as the widely presumed Next President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana has aptly been known to say.

Indeed, if there is any practically fecund or productive example worthy of the emulation of the 2024 Bawumia Presidential-Election Campaign, it is definitely none other than the tried and tested example of the United States of America, Ghana’s foremost political and ideological role model, where the Running-Mate of the Nominee of either of our major political parties, namely, the presently ruling Democratic Party (DP) and the main opposition Republican Party (RP) is traditionally not officially selected and introduced to the general public until sometime in late Jule or early July for the early November quadrennial General Election.

The remarkable exception here is only when the Presidential Nominee or Candidate of the ruling party also happens to be the Presidential Incumbent, as presently happens to be case with the Democratic Party-sponsored Mr. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., that the Running-Mate almost invariably becomes a fait accompli or a routine and a procedural matter of course, as it were. Even so, the Vice-Presidential Candidate or Running-Mate is not officially announced and/or introduced to the general public until the quadrennial National Convention of either of the two aforementioned major political parties.

It is, therefore, tantamount to a peevish display of an abject lack of emotional and psychological maturity for any pundits on the ground, back home, to be impetuously, jejunely and sophomorically attempting to stampede our Oxbridge- and Simon Fraser-educated former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana into hurriedly and prematurely selecting his Running-Mate, on the sole and the gratuitous grounds of the fact of the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress’ having, predictably, selected his gender-token of a lackluster and decidedly effete and jaded Running-Mate.

Maybe somebody more strategically savvy needs to remind Dr. Asah-Asante that the key operatives of the Elephant Party, as the ruling New Patriotic Party is also popularly known, do not dance or jig to the cacophonous tunes of the national development demolition squad that is the vanguard apparatchiks of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress. They never did and are highly unlike to ever do so in the foreseeable future. Rather, as Mr. S K Kwafo, my old Akuapem-Akropong SALEM schoolmaster, the “Tokyo-Joe”-sporting proud prince of Akwamufie – that is, the ancient Akwamu royal stool house – was fond of saying back in those Draconian disciplinary days: “I wait until the weather is ice-cold, then I melt up the blood of my stubborn and recalcitrant pupils with my waterlogged willow cane.”

Trust me, Dr. Asah-Asante and the other pundits back home who reason just like him, the identity and the name of the Running-Mate of Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia is known and has been widely known among the circles of those party stalwarts and loyalists who really need to know for quite a considerably while now, that is, well ahead of the tired and the nauseatingly predictable reselection of a hopelessly spent Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, the has-been 2020 Presidential Running-Mate of Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja. For the Principals of the Party of Inexhaustible Possibilities, we prefer to wait until all is set and ready to fly; and then, we surefire as Sikagua/Sikadwa Kofi, flap our jumbo wings and zoom, do we cozily land on the fourth floor of Jubilee House! Simple as that, buddy.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 22, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]