I'll run for president in 2012, says Arthur K
Arthur Kobina Kennedy, the Chairman of Nana Akufo-Addo's Communication Committee says he will challenge Nana Akufo-Addo to become the presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party in 2012. He said this in an interview published in the Times & Democrat, Tuesday, December 22.
In the interview with Dionne Gleaton of the Orangeburg daily, in South Carolina, Dr Kennedy says he feels "good about having participated in the democratic process and will return to Ghana to run for the presidency during the 2012 election," the paper puts it.
He speaks of how highly the voters of Ghana hold him after he ran for the New Patriotic Party's flagbearership in 2007 and did a good job in heading his party's communications outfit for the 2008 presidential campaign.
He lays a lot of the blame for his party's defeat on insufficient training giving to the party's polling agents and their inability to police the ballots on election day.
On his own chances of becoming the next president of Ghana, Dr Arthur Kennedy, who has written a controversial book on his party's performance, is upbeat and compares himself to Barrack Obama.
“I think it is a learning experience and if you learn well from it — from such a close election and mistakes —- four years from now my party will probably be back in power. It's about effort, it's not about results. I'm sure a lot of people wrote Obama off, so it's about the effort. Sometimes you fall short, but you try again,” he said.
He remembers how young people explained his own impact upon them on the night following the Ghanian presidential primary in 2007. He got one vote out of a possible 2,325.
“So many young people were saying, 'You give us hope that this can be a better country, that this can be a country where we have people with ideas and where people can argue about ideas instead of personalities.' As you try to do these things, hopefully, you touch a few lives,” Kennedy says.
He speaks highly of his communications skills. He also says Ghanaians, after listening to his ideas for the nation, believed he was the best of the 17 candidates even though he came last.
“People feel like they should be able to walk up to you and be able to recognize you. That takes time to do. Because of that, everybody recognized my skills and my ability to communicate. There were 17 candidates. Everyone said I had the best ideas of anybody about solving the problems the country had. Even though I hadn't done well in the primary, everyone knew that I had a lot of skills and potential,” he adds.
Kennedy says a lot of individuals knew that he wasn't going to clinch the presidency, but it was more about positioning himself for the future.
“If my party had won, I probably would be in government given my role in the general election campaign,” he says.
Kennedy says he will divide his time between Columbia and Ghana until the next election.
“I have an appointment to go teach at a medical school in Ghana at the University of Cape Coast School of Medicine. I'm working out the details. I'll be working here and teaching there until 2012, when I'll spend most of the year campaigning with my party in between helping teach medical students medicine,” he says.
The report describes Dr Kennedy as a "radical revolutionary" who returned to his native land from which he was exiled twice.
On his return, he found a country that had undergone drastic change.
Like America, there were no cell phones; nor was there freedom of the press back in the 1980s when he participated in student-led demonstrations against a militaristic regime. It seemed a society languishing in poverty and ethnocentrism would never change, the paper writes.
Dr. Arthur Kennedy never lost the sense of urgency he first felt as a young student at the University of Ghana Medical School more than 20 years ago. He became the first medical student in the country to ever become president of Commonwealth Hall at the university and the first to ever become president of the National Union of Students.
The report continues, he was a fierce fighter who sought to end the military regime and return elective government, knowing full well the risks to his life.
He had no qualms about returning to the sub-Saharan country in 2007. He wanted to become president.
'An interesting experience'
Kennedy had served as chief executive officer of Family Health Center Inc. in Orangeburg since 2002, but was ready to move back to Ghana to have more of a presence among the constituents he was trying to reach.
He ran on the New Patriot Party ticket and vied to become the party's candidate during a presidential primary held in 2007.
Kennedy lost the primary and his party lost the December 2008 general election, serving as communication committee chairman for the NPP campaign.
He said his experience was more than a journey across Ghana's 10 regions and 230 constituencies. It was a journey which allowed him to reconnect with the people from whom he was once separated.
“It was an interesting experience. I traveled all around and went to every constituency about two or three times. I saw firsthand how much poverty there is in the country. I remember one day a road was just really a track. It is the only road in the western region that goes to a number of districts. A very big vehicle had gotten stuck in the mud. No traffic would move for three months as a result,” he says.
Kennedy says the culture has changed greatly from when he was a young student.
“There's lots of freedom now. People can speak their minds, and there are all these newspapers that have proliferated. It ended up being that a lot of people that grew up from my generation knew who I was from those days when I was a student there. I have lost touch with a lot of them. One of the party's people told me, 'It's not that we don't know you, but it's that you don't know us,'” he says.
The general election was considered the closest in Africa's history. It was one of the reasons why U.S. President Barack Obama http://www.thetandd.com/articles/2008/01/23/vgallery/doc4796c3299884b509875113.txt chose to visit Ghana in July during his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office, Kennedy says.
“For the opposition party (National Democratic Congress) to have won such a close election, it was good for Africa to have an election in which there was some low-grade violence, but not generalized violence. About nine million people voted, and the winner won by less than 40,000 votes. That is close,” Kennedy says.
'It's about effort, not results'
Kennedy has since authored a book entitled, “Chasing the Elephant in the Bush: The Politics of Complacency.” Kennedy says the book will hopefully motivate his own party to take at look at itself and correct issues of cockiness and complacency which he said likely contributed to the party's failure in the general election.
Why write a book?
“We don't write much in Africa. From independence, a lot of things have been word-of-mouth. I wanted to change the culture. I believe that when you document things, you can analyze them better and, hopefully, look at where mistakes were made and then be able to change them. The second reason I wrote the book was to create a reflection for our party and, hopefully, help us do better in the next election in 2012,” Kennedy says.
“One issue I had was how lax my party was on election day. I thought that based on the polling that I saw, more people intended to vote for my party than the opposition party. But we didn't get people out to vote. There were places in the country with 10,000 people and only 5,000 votes. We didn't do those things well in getting our supporters to vote.
“We also didn't police the counting well. Our agents ... were not as well trained as maybe they should have been. There were a few places where maybe more attention may have given us a different outcome.”
Throughout his journey, Kennedy has had the support of his wife, Evelyn, and their young sons, Kwamina, 9, and Kofi, 8.
“When you live in America, you take a lot of things for granted. But my children had a chance to compare lifeclasss. You take them to Ghana and they live in a big house and a car takes them to school, but they can't completely escape the environment, the poverty. I think it was a very interesting experience for them. They now appreciate what it means to be born in America and to live here. But I'm hoping that during my lifetime, things will be better in Ghana and Africa,” he says.