NPP's Moderates Must Seize Control Of Their Party Now

Author's note: This piece was written on 18/6/2013. It is being posted today, because I was unable to do so on the day. Please read on: 


I have often  wondered   what the views of the hard-working and prosperous middle-class people in the neighbourhood I live, really are, when contentious national issues have come up for debate,  in the court of public opinion.


Those hard-working and prosperous Ghanaians,  who live in my neighbourhood,  are a natural constituency for the New Patriotic Party (NPP).


Clearly, if the NPP wants to continue holding  on to the support of this particular demographic in Ghanaian society, the party must distance itself from the old-style Ghanaian politics - in which cynical and extremist politicians often  hire  thugs,  petty criminals and  muscled-spongers  as "enforcers",  to dish out insults and  physical punishment to independent minds, such as  the party's Charles Wireko-Brobbeys and Kwame Pianims.


For such fair-minded and hard-working middle-class Ghanaians of good conscience,  who also believe in the enterprise Ghana, the question  is: should the NPP not  be presenting Ghanaians with alternative policies, whenever criticising the regime currently in power in Ghana,  and gaining more new converts to its cause that way - instead of the endless insults and negativity, which  is now standard fare  for its small army of  "communicators", many of whom wax lyrical,   doom-mongering  on the airwaves of radio and television stations across the nation, and only end up putting off so many independent-minded,  patriotic and apolitical Ghanaians,  as a result of  their cynicism and endless negativity?


The intolerance shown by political parties in Ghana to independent-minds, is worrying in the extreme. Democracy is not only just a system of government -  it is also a way of life based on tolerance. Cutting-edge and innovative ideas seldom evolve from groups and societies that are intolerant of dissenting views.


Little wonder that party manifestos in Ghana seldom contain  creative ideas that are truly transformational.


It is not surprising that geniuses,    who for blinkered and cynical political reasons, even criticise  Supreme Court judges and accuse them of scarring off foreign investors -  for  ruling against foreign crooks running dodgy businesses here, which  defraud the Ghanaian nation-state to the tune of some tens of millions of euros,  by  fraudulently securing judgement-debt orders in the law courts against the Republic of Ghana - hold sway in the NPP of today. Incredible.


What, one wonders,  are we then to make of  regulators in the bastions of capitalism,  the UK and the US,  which not too long ago, slapped  fines of billions of dollars on leading banks guilty of manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), for example, I ask?


Did they drive away investors from the UK and the USA,  in droves, in acting against  banks engaged in what some would describe as near-criminal behaviour  - going by the strange logic of that NPP hardliner and genius?


It is those selfsame geniuses who have driven  the NPP's fleet of Yutong buses  to the end of so many  metaphorical cul-de-sacs that they  seem unable to reverse out of.


Let the pragmatists  and one-nation politicians in the NPP,  grab  the  steering wheels of their party's fleet of Yutong buses,  from the unsteady  hands of those smug,  arrogant and incompetent drivers,   whose poor map-reading skills lead only to cul-de-sacs, before December 2016 steals up on them.


The vast majority of ordinary Ghanaians are simply fed up with the nation-wrecking politics of violence, insults and  intolerance.


That is why the NPP must change course - and move away   from the path of  intolerance and endless negativity,  before it becomes  too late to do so.


Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo and the party's prosperous middle-class silent-majority-base - as well as the ordinary people of Ghana who are inconvenienced by all that negativity -   definitely deserve  better. The NPP's moderates must seize control of their party now. A word to the wise...


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