Jubilee House and Kumasi Mafia Should Desist from Sabotaging Bawumia’s Choice of Running-Mate

In all things New Patriotic Party (NPP), especially on issues and questions pertaining to the critical and the momentous choice of a Running-Mate for Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party, we can all be assuredly certain that the Kyebi or the so-called Akyem Mafia that presently rules the roost at Jubilee House, as it were, cannot mischievously attempt to unduly influence the selection of the preferred Running-Mate choice of the Walewale native, from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region, without the collusive and the collaborative complicity or the brazen interference of the Kumasi and/or the Asante Mafia, the most powerful cabal of its kind in the country, contrary to what Mr. Edward Ennin, the former New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Obuasi-East Constituency, in the Asante Region, would have the rest of the membership of the Global Ghanaian Community believe (See “How can you be president if you are afraid to choose a running mate? — Former NPP MP to Bawumia” Modernghana.com 6/21/24).

Now, that is an inexcusably cheap shot and a very simplistic approach for Mr. Ennin to take. Maybe if Yours Truly knew the precise set of circumstances under which the latter critic apparently lost his Obuasi-East Parliamentary Seat, we would be able to accurately and significantly gauge why Mr. Ennin is making such a downright simplistic statement or observation. At any rate, it goes without saying that administering the affairs of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, as party stalwart Dr. Bernard Okoe Boye has been fond of saying in the recent past, is a collaborative affair that entails the entire top-echelon leadership of the New Patriotic Party, although Mr. Ennin is equally right to observe that, ultimately, it is on the splendidly polished mahogany office desk or the front door of the legitimately elected 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling party that the proverbial and/or the metaphorical buck stops.

Still, on the question of the timing of his selection of a Running-Mate, Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia has absolutely not been unduly tardy or lethargic in the way and the manner being so flippantly suggested by some party stalwarts and pundits, as well as some suavely disguised hacks and hirelings of the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse. The stark fact of the matter, even as Yours Truly pointed out approximately a month, or so, ago, is that the leadership of the New Patriotic Party has absolutely no bounden obligation to follow the lead of a vision-bereft and politically desperate operatives of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), whose Dynastic Presidential Candidate, the twice-defeated, one-term former President John “I Have No Classmates In Ghana” Dramani Mahama, has been kicking and screaming his lungs out to be let back into Jubilee House, so that “He could correct his past mistakes.”

Candidate Bawumia, on the other hand, has not been in a rush to name or select his Running-Mate for the December 2024 Presidential Election because he, like the very thoughtful and deliberate scholar and intellectual that he indubitably is and has always been, the Simon Fraser, Canada, Doctor of Economics Degree Holder and former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana wants to make the sort of savvy decision that would not force him to have to puerilely come back to Ghanaian voters with his hands over his head, four years down the line, crying like a toddler and claiming, rather grotesquely and scandalously, that it had all been a mistake, and that he rather luridly wants to be afforded a clearly undeserved second chance and the certain possibility of making even more egregious blunders at the helm of our national affairs.

As we also noted not very long ago, even right here in the United States of America, of whose democratic political culture Ghanaian leaders have been slavishly imitative or copycat, the Running-Mate of legitimately elected Presidential Candidates of either of our two major political parties, namely, the presently ruling Democratic Party (DP) and the main opposition Republican Party (RP), are not cheaply and hurriedly selected until well into late June and July of the Election Year. Ultimately, though, my Best Money is smack on Education Minister Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum, Ghana’s foremost education reformer, policy planner and developer and the Doctoral Degree Holder in Education Management from the University of Southern California and an unrivaled innovator for more than 30 years, and absolutely not the Manhyia Central’s New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament who literally rode on the coattails of the Bosomtwe Constituency’s Member of Parliament of the New Patriotic Party, also a bona fide indigene from the foremost stronghold of the New Patriotic Party, to lay claim to ministerial fame and cheap popularity.

You see, even as Energy Minister, as one of my Austria-resident brothers-in-law bitterly lamented to this author in a recent telephone conversation, Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh – aka NAPO – has proven himself to be the most embarrassingly ill-starred Akufo-Addo cabinet appointee who does not have even the most rudimentary appreciation of what constitutes “Renewal Energy Resources,” and even once had the ignorance-laden temerity to tell the host of a television talking-heads program that “Solar panels do not produce any usable stored energy at night.” Now, the question of how such a rankly ministerially incompetent medically trained professional found himself officially deputizing as a cabinet appointee in charge of our Energy Ministry for President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, continues to stagger the imagination of my Akuapem-Abiriw born in-law, Mr. Ebenezer Kofi Koranteng Addo – aka English Man – and Akyem-fathered Austria-based sanitation worker, to this day.

And Mr. Ennin really supposes that the Kumasi and the Asante Mafia have absolutely nothing substantive to do with such gross sectoral, administrative incompetence? Come on, give us a break, “Edward Michael”!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
June 23, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]