Bamba with the Big Boys.
By Anonymous · 5 October 2026 · Politics
I have news from Kumasi that I suspect even you, who once told the colonial office to pack its bags, would have to read twice.
On Saturday, the New Patriotic Party gathered more than seven thousand delegates at Baba Yara Stadium to elect its national leaders. Thirteen people ran for three vice chairmanship seats. On that list were former ministers, a former communications director, people with titles before their names and letters after them, the kind of résumés that need a stapler. When the counting was done, the man at the very top was Kwadwo Fosu Boadu. Ghana knows him as Kojo Bamba.
Osagyefo, I went looking for his credentials. I searched the way we search for our names on the WASSCE results list: carefully, with a little sweat. I found no university, no master's degree, no "Dr." and no "Esq." What I found instead was history of a different kind. In 2017, the newspapers described a Kojo Bamba as the leader of the Delta Force. That was not the American special forces unit, Osagyefo. It was the Kumasi edition, the pro-NPP vigilante group that made headlines in the party's early days in government. In 2019, a Kwadwo Bamba stood up on radio and announced that the Delta Force was disbanded. He also said he would run for office in his party. Most people laughed. Kojo did not.
He went to work instead. He became a constituency man, then a youth wing operations man. When he campaigned this year, he made no grand speeches about macroeconomic frameworks. His message was almost embarrassingly simple: the constituency executives who guard the polling stations are forgotten the moment power arrives, and he would not forget them.
And the delegates, Osagyefo, the delegates remembered him.
He polled 3,116 votes and finished ahead of a former minister of state. The research firms had already crowned someone else. One respected pollster had another candidate cruising to First Vice by more than twenty points. That candidate came third. The pollsters have since gone quiet, which in Ghana is a rare and beautiful sound.
So here we are. The book-long lawyers who quote Article this and Section that, the so-called educated class who speak English with their noses, the commentators who analyse on television in three languages: all of them have been taught a lesson by a man whose CV may fit on a sticky note. They had the certificates. He had the constituencies. In a delegates' election, Osagyefo, the constituencies vote.
Let me be fair, because you taught us to be serious people. A vigilante past is not a small thing, and Ghana's democracy has paid real costs for political muscle. Kojo Bamba now holds an office where every word he says carries the party's name. The question is no longer whether he can win. He has answered that loudly. The question is what kind of First Vice Chairman he will be, and whether the same hands that once organised muscle can now organise fairness. I hope so, for the party's sake and for Ghana's.
But I cannot pretend I did not smile. There is something deeply Ghanaian about it. We worship certificates, frame them, hang them above the television, and introduce our children by them. And every few years, someone comes along who has none of the paper but all of the belief. He believed in himself before anyone else did, and then he convinced seven thousand people to believe with him.
You were once a young man from Nkroful whom the establishment did not take seriously either, Osagyefo. They called you an agitator. You called yourself a man in a hurry. I suspect you would have recognised something in Kojo Bamba. You might not have voted for him, but you would have understood him.Certificates open doors. Belief, it turns out, can walk through walls. You want to Bamba with the big boys ?
So long
Ato_KD