“When a frog decides to play cow without checking its elasticity, its intestines gets disgorged, exposing its real size.” – Swahili proverb
When the independent media was every decent Ghanaians delicacy from the 90s into the 2000s, political defections were major stories that attracted discussion and reviews. You didn’t find the Daily Graphic or Ghanaian Times rummaging on that stuff. Their Editors were ‘officialise’ in production, and for good reasons, too. If you had a Christian Aggrey or any of the GIJ lecturers who mixed journalism with propaganda that said that Ewes were the majority ethnic community in Ghana, it was worse.
It was The Chronicle, Ambassador Kabral Amihere’s Independent; Kweku Baako’s Crusading Guide, Eddie Blay’s Daily Guide and fearless Eben Quarcoo and Thommy Thompson’s Free Press etc that traditionally chewed on those material, just to spike Chairman Rawlings and his bunch in government.
Particularly in 2000, it was the PNDC’s decision to turn itself into a political party as player and referee and match commissioner and the GFA in one capricious lump that caused quite a stir, culminating in even brazen PNDC/NDC boys saying ‘Habah’, and defecting from the party to create another ‘free party.
Defection Train
So, we had under JJR’s helpless gaze, Goosie’s battalions and Dr. Yves Wereko Brobbey platoons breaking loose and helping eat up the crumbling piece of the PNDC/NDC pie and forcing a round two in 2000 in which the NDC under Prof Evans Atta Mills fell. Indeed, that became my pal Goosie’s unpardonable sin which cost him several thousands of votes at the last NDC presidential contest.
After the loss, we had late NDC Press Secretary Vincent Assiseh and co coming out to complain about the way things are done in the party and the need for reforms. “It is a machine for winning elections,” not a living organism with structures for stability and growth.
After Vincent came the Obed Yao Asamaoh, Bede Ziedeng, Amazonian Frances Assiam, Okaidja Adamafio and Kwaku Baah ferment in the next round of internal wrangling that hit the NDC – before boys like Sammy Gyamfi and Sammy Ablakwah came from the kindergarten to begin acting more Catholic than the Pope in our political space.
NPP defectors
On the side of the NPP, we had JA Kufuor’s right hand man Alhaji Inusah defecting on the eve of NPP victory. It appeared the architect was not reading from maestro Jake’s notes, so didn’t even know that the NPP was winning. He didn’t know that the NDC had become so vulnerable that a young man from Odododiodioo would pick the seat from former Interior Minister Okaidja Adamafio nor a Form Four leaver pick Dadekotopon would-be presidential aspirant Sylvester Mensah’s seat in crazy voting La. Then, we had the case of Kakra Essamuah, who also defected from the NPP, after so much abrasive politicking in the media against the NDC, with Mike Gizo and wife breaking the terrible news about the naked, reprehensible level of skulduggery in the NDC that should frighten all people who have conscience.
Finally, that saga of my good friend and ‘countryman’ Josiah Aryeh, who made the mistake of his life by fighting the Ahwois who even JJR had difficulty fighting in the late 90s. he was about to pick his Prof before he died. He made to many enemies by his political naiveté, despite his academic brilliance. As for the NDC girls who decided to loot his property when he exited, am glad Josiah’s clan heads chased them like bees. Well, he should be wringing his fingers from the side-lines of Hades. He failed to listen to KB Asante, Ato Quarshie and artist Prof Glover about joining the NDC.
Don’t want to cause a stir over that of the former NPP Regional Minister for the Volta Region. Hey, Kofi Dzamesi was a local Colossus. He and Courage Quashigah’s beautiful sister and the regional executive who became lepers in their own backyard because of a certain culture of politics that said Akans are our bitterest rivals. Tofiakwah, ‘They’ cannot rule over us. So, sea defence walls had to be desecrated with barrages of open defecation, even if that meant whole stretches of construction must go down under acid from the human tummy.
The NDC failed to learn its lessons and had some of its sons and daughters like the late Accra businessman who died over party cash and that other mulatto guy from the Central Region who jumped out of a train to his death outside Ghana. And we ask in the name of God why men would create a monster that would eat them up, just for the sake of money. That was why I was sad to hear about the sad case of an NDC communicator who is reportedly dead under equally strange circumstances. But while we wait for the full facts of the case, we must blame it on those who have poisoned our minds to accept the lie that one cannot make it in Ghana today, unless he joined the fat cats.
If that is the thinking we are pumping into the heads of our youth, then ts overtake in our bid to transform Ghana and leave a decent legacy for our kids just as the US, China, Turkey, UK, Malaysia and other nations rush to daily to pick sh-t, tomato and apples for a living. Of course, that’s not to say the other political parties are immune to this warped thinking.
Indeed, all over the world, political parties have goodies for its mainline activists. However, that not the same as the numbers that we see in this part of the world where foot soldiers must be fed like Kwabena ‘Akukor’ Darko’s chicken. I recall boys in La who were sponsored by the NDC under JJR to some nations in Europe and thought that that would add value to their lives and the party in the constituency. It was the same story of personal greed and everybody for himself. In the end, people started throwing juju on themselves, resulting in calamities that were taken for granted. That’s a far cry from the style of the NPP who would send graduate young men and ladies to Israel to study agriculture and return as potential entrepreneurs who can create jobs and help improve livelihoods.
In the case of the NDC, no mentoring, business generation, or impact on the family [African] or the larger community including construction of even an ‘atonko’ facility for a memorial. Crap. Yet, this is what we are selling to the youth, when their compatriots in Israel or Poland are using greenhouse technology to produce vegetables thrice a week and making a fortune out of that.
Burial of our Probity and Accountability tenets
Isn’t it strange that we made a fuss about Assets Declaration only for those probity and accountability saints to chicken out of the crusade on the eve of the 2020 election? That is why we still need to imbibe the Development in Freedom tenet and generate a breed of boys and girls with enough vision and courage to transform Ghana and create jobs for our teeming population.
If we ignorantly chased out the Siaws and Darko Mechanical Lloyds; or Kojo Sardines and Appentengs, let’s just say we erred and regret it. But we must show our kids that that was truly the way we ought to have gone, instead of persecuting them and selling off their businesses, only for us, beyond acting incompetent, to see the same apostles of probity and accountability brazenly act in ‘create, loot and share’ fashion and throw the crumbs to the poor nitwits in our alleys and Zongos.
Now writing about accountability reminds me about Sam Ablakwa’s oofee tsor crusade against the President’s travels and the conversation about a Presidential jet for a President whose Mercedes my cigarette-chomping cousin Gbevlo-Lartey seized in the heat of the 2008 NDC victory. In their warped thinking, he [Nana Addo] shouldn’t ride his own Mercedes and shouldn’t ride a presidential jet, too, but travel like the boys going to Italy and Spain through the desert and the infamous Lampedusa; or a six-foot canoe like his constituents on the Volta River…though even he [Ablakwa] has the luxury of a personal police security today.
But that’s what Ghana is turned to. Those days, Tongu was for big boys; not fingerlings; and Dadekotopon was for ‘gentleboy’ Larry’s dad, late Speaker Peter Ala Adjetey. And these were people who fought on their own steam, without party cash support or the World Bank culture that says “you put even a monkey into an NDC shirt in the Volta Region, and let it campaign on Aflao ‘malapropisms’, and it will still bring home the seat for the party that failed in 30 years to improve infrastructure, lives and livelihoods in its own World Bank stronghold.
Why did I forget about Wayoe Seini? Well, his defection story was too lugubrious.
- Am told that up in one constituency in the north, the NDC is consulting prophets – black and white – over whether Otiko Djaba would be running in 2024. And the prophets are split like our 2012 Election Petition Supreme Court judges. How desperate can a party be over just one seat and a harmless lady?
