While Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia was campaigning as the New Patriotic Party’s running mate in 2008, Mr. Freddie Blay was a member of parliament for the Convention People’s Party (CPP). He was a CPP MP for Elembele until January 7, 2009.
In 2011, Freddie Blay joined the NPP, and three years later, he was elected the NPP’s First National Vice Chairman.
A year later, in 2015, an internal rift rocked and resulted in the expulsion of NPP’s chairman, Mr. Paul Afoko. Freddie Blay was appointed as the Acting National Chairman of the NPP.
In 2018, Mr. Blay contested and won as the NPP’s National Chairman.
Dr. Bawumia, on the other hand, contested the 2008 election as running mate to Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and lost. The pair again lost the 2012 election, and when the NPP went to court to contest the election’s outcome, Dr. Bawumia was the star witness for the party in the televised petition hearing.
Some top NPP members I interviewed for my book said Dr. Bawumia’s acceptance to testify was an act of bravery and sacrifice, for it had the potential to obliterate his political career.
But if a heavy load placed on your head does not break you, it strengthens your neck. Dr. Bawumia acquitted himself creditably in the witness box, his brilliance endearing him to many outside the party. Some top NPP guns even tinkered with the idea that he should be fielded as the party’s candidate for 2016.
At his third attempt at the presidency, Nana Akufo-Addo won the 2016 presidential election, with Bawumia as his running mate.
The duo secured a re-election in 2020 and, in the 2024 election, Dr. Bawumia represented the NPP as its candidate, in which the party was defeated.
Today, Dr. Bawumia is campaigning again to lead the NPP in 2028, and some leading members of the party do not think he is fit to lead.
Their reason?
He is a stranger to the party, an outsider.
Do you now understand why I began this tale with Freddie Blay’s rise in the NPP? Was Freddy Blay, like Bawumia, not an outsider?
Well, Dr. Bawumia is a different kind of outsider or stranger. He is the only non-Akan in the NPP’s flagbearer contest. The NPP has long been tagged by its opponents as an Akan party. And Dr. Bawumia is the only candidate whose ethnicity and religion keep dripping from the venomous lips of his opponents.
The vilest of all tribal vitriol against Bawumia came this week from the Member of Parliament for Asante Akim South, Kwaku Asante Boateng.
In an interview granted on Adom FM, the MP is quoted as saying the following about Dr. Bawumia’s desire to lead the party: “When there is a vacant seat in the family to be filled, you don’t give it to an outsider who was brought into the family to serve. You don’t elevate an outsider or a slave who was brought in to serve to the highest seat.”
He added: “We brought Bawumia and made him Vice President and that should be enough. You don’t elevate such an outsider to the main seat. He has been honoured with the Vice President and that should be enough. He was an outsider who just served us.”
As extreme and unfortunate as these words are, they mirror a dangerous obsession among many others who see the NPP as an ethnic possession. In the previous race ahead of the 2024 election, Dr. Bawumia’s main contender, Kennedy Agyapong, said in a media interview that if the NPP voted for Bawumia, then Ghana would have two northerners as flagbearers of the main political parties in the presidential election.
Meanwhile, it never occurred to anyone in the past to question why only southerners had led the winnable political parties in Ghana.
As these attacks against Bawumia show no signs of abating, it would be helpful to the NPP, especially those seeking to lead on account of ethnicity, to think a bit more deeply.
If you denigrate non-Akans to win as your party’s candidate, how will you campaign to the members of the other ethnic groups in the main election?
Instead of fixating on where Dr. Bawumia comes from, scrutinise his competence and his character.
Don’t revisit the harrowing history of slavery, where powerful ethnic groups invaded others and sold them off to the white man.
That is a part of the history we should put behind us.
It’s divisive. It’s dangerous. It’s politically suicidal.
Indeed, Dr. Bawumia has served the party, as you admit. In 2016, he worked like a donkey. He took all the bullets, and much of the political wounds he continues to nurse today were sustained on the campaign battlefield.
His services helped to win the election. That victory put the party in power, where some of you have made hundreds of millions and billions through multiple lucrative government contracts. Don’t take your followers for fools.
If Dr. Bawumia is seeking to lead your party, judge him on the content of his character and whether he has paid his dues.
Anything short of this would not be an attack against not only Bawumia, but everyone who does not belong to the dominant ethnic group whose hegemony you seek to perpetuate.
And you must stop digging your own graves unless you don’t want to go beyond the internal primaries.
I, as someone from northern Ghana, will not support or vote for someone who thinks people from my part of the country are not fit to lead.
I may not be alone.
And people from northern Ghana may not be alone.
By Manasseh Azure Awuni
