WHY THE CPP MUST NOW PART WAYS WITH THE BRILLIANT DR. PAA KWESI NDUOM

If ever the ideas of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah were needed to guide the future direction of our homeland Ghana, it is now. So, when the party of Nkrumah, the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), once the vanguard of the masses, faces an existentialist crisis, and so many Progressives fail to understand that, it is very worrying indeed.

This is no time to be conciliatory towards the very people formenting trouble in the party of Nkrumah - when others are trying hard to build it into a solid organisation: with a grass-roots, bottom-up approach.

Those who want the CPP to be reorganised into a solid party, must not allow an opportunity to rid the CPP of an irritating megalomaniac, determined to hijack the party of Nkrumah for his own selfish ends, to pass them by.

Why must they permit a dangerous situation to degenerate and morph into some hypocritical Emperor-with-no-clothes drama, in which the audience go along with that pure nonsense on bamboo stilts - using hypocritical and diplomatic language, implying that somehow the Emperor is dressed in gold-threaded silken clothes: instead of pointing out that, frankly, the protagonist is actually stark naked?

True Nkrumaists aren't interested in the farce in which people are opening what in effect are meant to be the branch offices of the holding company of a wealthy tycoon's conglomerate - staffed with yes-men and yes-women: all paid to do his bidding - and pretending that they are CPP offices. We are not all visually-impaired in the party of Nkrumah, luckily - so some of us can see through what is going on.

Let those now vociferously singing the song of appeasement in the CPP and dancing energetically to that discordant tune, and who are completely forgetting the raison d'etre of Nkrumaism, remember that this is a nation in which the ruling elites are content to tolerate the totally unacceptable situation, in which, on a daily basis, one sees thousands of working people struggling to get unto tro-tro minibuses to get to work - rising early in order not to be late for work and returning home late at night, because of the difficulty of getting transport home. What kind of quality of life is that, I ask?

Do such appeasing individuals ever ask themselves, why, when Ghana under Nkrumah pioneered the idea of affordable housing estate projects for the benefit of ordinary people, we now have a society in which huge disparities in wealth exist, and is faced with an acute shortage of well-designed and well-built affordable flats and houses for ordinary people to rent, nationwide?

Yet, more and more exclusive gated-communities are still springing up: many of the posh houses built in them remaining unoccupied and unsold. But, are there not millions in need of decent and affordable accommodation countrywide, in Nkrumah's Ghana - and has there not been a lack of the political will and creative leadership needed to make our nation meet that need, for over a decade now?

Where is the political will to commit resources; revamp the State Housing Company (SHC) by giving the management and workers 25 percent of the company, float a further 25 percent on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) to raise interest-free capital, for the company - and if the Ghanaian nation-state were to keep the remaining 50 percent of the shareholding as a strategic investment, enabling it to influence the housing sector through it, would the government of the day, not be able to get private sector real estate companies to partner the SHC to build well-designed and well-built affordable rental accommodation, countrywide: by making rental income from such public private partnerships (PPP's) completely tax free?

How many potentially brilliant future engineers, biochemists, medical doctors, accountants, lawyers, soil analysts, computer programmers and psychologists, are now pounding pavements in cities and towns across Ghana on a daily basis, selling fried plantain and worthless imported bric-a-brac - because their families could not afford to pay for them to continue with their education, I ask?

Yet, it is the brain-power of Ghanaians, which will make our nation a prosperous one, in the knowledge economy of the information age.

So why should we allow Nkrumah's Ghana to continue to be dominated by political parties, which do not understand that a poor developing nation cannot afford not to provide free education, from kindergarten to tertiary level, to all those who have the aptitude to study?

Now an oil-producing nation, this country at last has an opportunity to transform itself into an African equivalent of the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia, within a decade - and it is only the party of Nkrumah, run as a collective, not some one-man-show, that can make that happen.

There is a lot of work for Nkrumaists to do for Mother Ghana's well-being - but we cannot do so with a party in disarray: and beholden to one man and the sycophants that surround him.

Surely, this is no time to be cowardly and hypocritical? We must call a spade a spade. It is indeed nonsensical for any individual to think that he or she can mount a reverse takeover of Nkrumah's party. For his own good, and to secure the future of the CPP, those who have the power to do so, must expel Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom from the party of Nkrumah. Period.

Let him go and form his own New Free Enterprise Party (NFEP) and use it to mount a bid for the presidency - he will be able to dominate it completely and use it for his own purposes: and be master in his own house.

Alas, unfortunately, as is often the case in such matters, he is surrounded mostly by cowardly individuals who depend on him for their 'survival-cash', and will never tell him the bitter truth. If truth be told, he cannot lead the party of Nkrumah - because he is simply not qualified to do so: despite his undoubted brilliance and his success as a world-class individual and a wealthy entrepreneur.

This is the last opportunity the CPP has to rebuild itself. That is why it must not allow itself to be distracted from that all-important task. What has to be done, must be done - and quickly done. Let those who have the power to do so, act quickly, to expel Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom from the party of Nkrumah now. A word to the wise...

Tel (Powered by Tigo - the one mobile phone network in Ghana that actually works!): + 233 (0) 27 745 3109.