The National Democratic Congress (NDC) lost the 2016 presidential election in a manner unprecedented in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, because the bitter infighting for the control of the party was equally unprecedented since the exit of Rawlings as President of Ghana on 6th January 2001.
The candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Akufo-Addo, easily beat the incumbent, John Mahama, by nearly one million votes. In the parliamentary, the NPP had 169 seats with the NDC having 106 seats. The former President John Mahama defeated Nana Akufo-Addo in 2012, and it ended at the Supreme Court for eight good months, and so John Mahama, as Ghana’s President, ruled Ghana for only three years and four months, after wasting eight months at the Supreme Court – No lessons were learnt at all from that ordeal by the NDC leaders. You see, the Kwesi Botchway Committee’s final report might have been kept under lock and key, but the unwarranted attacks on Rawlings, the NDC Founder, will likely make the confusion in the NDC more intense, because the party now has three main factions, as compared to two for the NPP – the Kufuor and Akufo-Addo factions. In the NDC’s confusion, we have two factions that have formed an ‘Unholy Alliance’ against one – that is the Rawlings faction. The three factions I earlier talked about in the NDC are the Mahama faction, Mills faction and Rawlings faction.
In 2016, Rawlings was left out of the campaigning and he stayed in his residence, and yet when the party lost that must-win election, accusing fingers were pointed at him. Didn’t the NDC leaders know that Rawlings, the Founder of the party, could set up the NDC for defeat in 2016? When Rawlings appeared in Cape Coast for the NDC campaign launch, he did not endorse President Mahama as the NDC presidential candidate, and NDC leaders and the rank and file saw that as normal, but it spoke volumes to all discerning cadres, including this writer, and it has now come to pass, isn’t it? The basis for the NDC’s humiliating defeat was simply because certain people in the party were never recognised at the NDC campaign launch at Cape Coast. The Founder asked the party supporters to wait until after the 2016 elections before he would go round the country to rebuild the party. That one too, nobody took him serious, while some elected and appointed party executives refused to analyse the Founder’s short speech, even though Rawlings’ absence from the NDC campaign trail in 2016 became the talk of the town. Therefore, apart from Cape Coast, where the NDC launched its National Campaign in August, Jerry Rawlings was not seen at any major event, including the Manifesto launch of the party in Sunyani in late September 2016.
Their ‘New NDC’ members said that you can ignore the NDC clear policy direction in the party constitution, and everybody could do whatever he/she liked and beat the NPP in 2016, and that was it. The NDC was then in power, but the then opposition NPP was in full control indirectly, as the NDC had carefully sidelined all core members of the party, and did not want to see or even hear their names, and if Rawlings’ cadres, including this writer, became ‘endangered species’ that must be wiped out from the party, why wouldn’t the party lose in 2016?
When I was a Party Agent for the NDC in 2016, I was at the polling station as early as 4am that day until 7am when voting started, and by 4pm that very day, I saw defeat staring at me right in the face, because the food for the polling agents arrived at 4:45pm, and that was rice and beans with big fish heads, while the NPP, then in opposition, fed their polling agents with tea and bread, laced with eggs, in the morning, they gave them rice at 12pm and returned with Banku at 3pm. The sitting Municipal Chief Executive was the parliamentary candidate for the NDC at the Obuasi East Constituency. Therefore, if you are in power and could not feed your polling agents with food on time; if you cannot even feed them well twice, do you expect them to perform well, since some of them may not be committed to the cause of the party? I did not eat my rice but gave it to some party supporters, because I had eaten at 3am in the house before going there, and also used by own money to buy food.
As far back as 2010, the Mills administration had laid down a deadly plot to oust Rawlings, and falsely believed that they would succeed in removing, not only Rawlings, but all his cadres, and this explains why the cadres have no place in the NDC constitution. Can you imagine this? The Nkrumahist who are disposed within the NDC and the NPP have all crept into the NDC, and were organising as a powerful group, and they chose the late President Mills as their leader. President Mills then decided to put Dr. Nkrumah on his agenda, and so he declared his birthday as Founder’s Day and a public holiday for Ghana, and upstaged Rawlings with Dr. Nkrumah without even consulting Rawlings, who is not an Nkrumahist. If it is possible to form a new political party and win elections, go ahead and leave the NDC alone.
Most NDC leaders, and even the rank and file, did not know and were not aware that the 31st December Revolution had nothing to do with Nkrumah, even though 90% of its followers, including this writer, were former Young Pioneer Cadres. Former President Mills was, therefore, a slow but sure man, with some vicious professors hiding in the Winneba campus fighting secretly for him, and Mills pretended being a very calm person who will never accuse anybody, including Rawlings, while stabbing him in the back with his misconceived agenda, and so those who attack Rawlings would talk to themselves without their mobile phones, and they would be seen as crazy men. President Rawlings reacted by always using his mouth to condemn the Mills administration from 2010 to 2016.
The bitter conflict within the NDC, between the former First Lady and the then sitting President Mills since 2011, had given some people reason to suspect that if they sidelined the Rawlingses, and the people decided to sit on the fence and not support the Mills’ campaign. There was going to be a disaster, so for the NDC, it was important at that stage to show that even if Rawlings and his wife were at home, more people would be coming. Why do you people always hide the truth from the rank and file of NDC supporters? This is very shameful.
There is little doubt that Rawlings has been the focus of each NDC campaign since he shed his military uniform in 1992 and contested as a civilian flagbearer of the NDC and beat the late Professor Adu Boahen of the NPP in November 1992. His personality resonates with voters.
In the NDC, it was believed that Rawlings influence was still over whelming strong among the grassroots supporters of the party. Therefore, if a handful of people thought they could do without Rawlings, it was a very big mistake, because Jerry Rawlings still commands substantial supporters, not only within the NDC, but within the country.
If it was possible for him to come back into active politics if we removed the term limit clauses in the 1992 Constitution, I bet you that every Ghanaian would see the big difference. The Hawks in the NDC are a handful of people who had, and still have, a misconceived agenda to oust Rawlings from the party as far back as 2010, and those who led that secret agenda were some three ‘Intellectual Coyotes’ that have now recoiled into their shells at the Winneba College of Education after Mills’ sudden death in 2012. If you did not help to build the NDC in 1992, please don’t destroy this great party.
One worse situation and the inner turmoil had been the Mills administration’s interest in changing the nations’ plans for housing its former Heads of State. The Mills government then supported giving ex-Heads of States rent allowances instead of building permanent residences for them, as proposed by past End-Of-Service (ESB) committees. That announcement came as his government was locked in a political tussle over the accommodation issues of the Rawlingses. The rest is now history, since Mills is dead and no more. Now, how badly did the Mills-Rawlings feud hurt the NDC’s chances during the 2012 and 2016 general elections?
The answer is that President Mills died suddenly in office so Ghanaians gave Mr. John Mahama sympathy votes in just three months of campaigning, which ended up at the Supreme Court for eight good months, and Mahama ruled Ghana for only three years and four months, because the Mills-Rawlings feud was indirectly transferred into his administration, where we had the Rawlings Boys from an imaginary White House who would get nothing in the then NDC government, while the Mills/Mahama Boys were all eating with both hands and talking rubbish in their impossible attempt to oust Rawlings and his cadres completely from the very party they sacrificed to build for the past 28 good years. They were no longer sure of the importance of the Rawlings factor to the electoral fortunes of the NDC, because they argued that Rawlings, by describing the then President Mills as weak and incompetent, and also accusing government officials as ‘Greed Bastards,’ went overboard in his attack. Anyway, Rawlings should have stated that some greedy bastards and not all Mills appointees, but Rawlings had been proved right because some of the extreme greedy bastards are already languishing in prison, as they were jailed by the NPP administration, but most Mills supporters took offence and sought to minimise Rawlings role in NDC party decisions, while secretly planning behind the scenes to change the NDC into the CPP in 2009. Madam Hannah Tetteh, a former Minister of Trade and Industry and former Communications Director for the NDC, described Rawlings as a ‘Loose Cannon’ who sometimes loses sight of his role. That was on Match 7th 2009, according to a cable signed be Pamela Bridgewater, then U.S. Ambassador to Ghana. Rawlings realises his political days are over and the party has definitely moved beyond him, but managing him is still a challenge, according to WikiLeaks. If what Hannah Tetteh said in 2009 was not enough evidence to figure out the THICKNESS OF THE PLOT TO OUST RAWLINGS FROM THE NDC, the pronouncement of the NDC General Secretary, when the party welcomed Dr. Obed Asamoah and his DFP back into the fold, was most telling. Now ‘the Barking Dog’ whose actions forced you (Asamoah) out of the NDC no longer exists, so I would have been surprised if you had continued to stay outside,” that was also on 8th October, 2009 at the welcome ceremony of the DFP. Yes, the ‘Barking Dog’ no longer exists; was he dead like ex-Prez Mills or what?
The late Cabinet of Prez Mills rocked the boat and caused confusion in the party on whose ticket he was elected, and the NDC national officers also implemented that infamous decision and passed it down to the NDC Regional and Constituency Offices nationwide, and the innocent members of the party’s rank and file were incited against Rawlings and his wife, and cadres became ‘Endangered Species’ in the NDC in their impossible attempt to destroy and finally oust Jerry Rawlings, so what are some people now talking about? Come on. Then, in 2016, the NDC leaders ran as quickly as their legs could carry them to the Volta Region, which is said to be their World Bank, for massive votes in order to beat the NPP in 2016, only to find out that the people in the region were seriously engaged in stock taking, because how could you insult Rawlings, their only begotten son, and rush to his home region, which you describe as the NDC World Bank, for votes? You thought you were very smart and wise by refusing to work with the NDC party constitution, and rather chose your own style by forming your so-called ‘New NDC,’ where everybody did what he/she liked, and the end result was a very humiliating defeat by the NPP by almost a million votes, and you turn round to blame Rawlings and his wife. Some people in the NDC believe falsely that the 31st December Revolution was launched with toy pistols and toy guns, and these are the very people who would soon be exposed for what they are. If you talk to yourself while walking without a mobile phone, the public would think that you are a mentally deranged politician, an insane politician, a stupid clown in a circus, a crazy politician, until you become a full blown mad politician who cannot see anything beyond your stomach.
On 7th December 2016, which was a voting day across the nation, the people of the Volta Region were taking stock to discuss their indirect political isolation, the un-equal distribution of the national cake, and the tonnes of unprintable insults always heaped on their only begotten son, Jerry John Rawlings, who happens to be the Founder of the very political party that claims that the Volta Region is its World Bank. This led to a protest vote. Now, do you think that the Ewes are class one children or what?
This writer is not an Ewe but a Dagau from the Upper West Region in Ghana so, my brothers and sisters in the Volta Region should Cry Freedom?
I shall return. ‘JaanbieIwaii’ Aluta Continua!
Clement Sangaparee
United Cadres Front
Obuasi
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s editorial stance
The post Those who attack Rawlings would soon talk without their mobile phones appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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