Election 2024: Establish “Foot Soldiers Desk” to celebrate the gallant NDC youth

During the just ended 2024 general elections, the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) has been subjected to arguably the most humiliating defeat ever witnessed in the history of this country. The NPP’s presidential candidate and Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has suffered a crushing defeat due to how badly the country was managed, he was thrashed with close to 1.6 million vote differences.

In the parliamentary elections, whiles the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has achieved two-third of the 276 seats, whiles the NPP is struggling to get 90 seats. This is unprecedented and credit must be given to the campaign team, NDC executives from national, regional, constituencies and down to the branch levels for their hard work in chalking this success.

However, there is taxonomy of the society that deserves special mentioning and commendations for their diligence, vigilance and determinations during and after the election. This is the party’s foot soldiers who protected the ballot papers from the polling stations to the collation centres; they did an excellent job for the NDC. Their efforts thwarted all the efforts of the NPP to rig this election through ballot stuffing and ballot box swapping.

Over the years, the NPP has adopted these dubious means to rig elections; it was not surprising when they were arrogantly and disrespectfully shouting that they had one million strategies of winning the election. Those strategies were to simply engage in ballot stuffing and swapping.

However, the NDC foot soldiers left no stone unturned to thwart these nefarious and shameless acts of electoral criminality. Hundreds of thousands of already thumb printed ballot papers ready to be stuffed in ballot boxes were seized by these gallant youth of the NDC especially in the Ashanti Region.

Furthermore, the NPP’s attempts to swap ballot boxes with “already thumb printed” ballot boxes were thwarted by these patriotic youth whose only motivation is to see to free and fair elections.

Without these youth, the NPP would have had their way and continue to subject this country to the cruelty we experienced in the last eight years, good riddance.

It is therefore essential for the NDC’s party’s national executives to acknowledge this wonderful act of patriotism by the youth in preserving the integrity of the country’s democracy. They must be appreciated, acknowledged, not be abandoned and neglected, because knowing the cunning nature of the NPP the heroism of these gallant youth will definitely be required again come 2028 and beyond.

Now that they have immensely contributed to this monumental victory, there should therefore be an avenue for them to reach out to the national executives and the party’s leadership whenever they feel the need to.

It will not be far-fetched to establish “Foot Soldiers Desk” at the national, regional and constituency levels so that the party’s foot soldiers can always channel their concerns, views, opinions and suggestions to the appropriate quarters. Establishing and maintaining this mutual relationship and respect between the party and its grass root i.e. foot soldiers will inure to the benefit of the party in a long term. One good turn deserves another.