NDC Must Go. But Voting Back NPP is a Waste of Vote...

The essence of Political Parties in power is to live up to their mandates; they have no business remaining at post when they have reneged on those promises. It is important to understand that nobody was born into a Political Party. Ridiculous statements such as “...in my family that is how we vote...” is middlebrow to say the least. Politicians use this subterfuge in caging you and I into voting for them always even when they break our necks.

Ghanaians will be better of as floating voters. Having followed the CPP's weekly Press series dubbed: “HOW CPP WILL DO IT”, and having been disappointed by both NPP and NDC, many of us are beginning to consider the CPP as a credible political alternative. We find it extremely difficult to understand for instance, why after 30 years of NPP and NDC, we still have pregnant mothers being carried in wheel barrows to health facilities where they are lucky, while many others die in the cause of labour; we find it difficult to understand why millions go to bed on empty stomachs and why many others are denied the right to education and health care; we don't understand why the streets have become homes for a teaming number of Ghanaians. Is it not a shame that after 30 solid years in the hands of these two, Ghana is nowhere near Brazil nor Singapore or Malaysia?

You voted out the NPP in 2008 because you hated what you saw; you were outraged by their hypocrisy. For instance, on how they condemned VAT and occasioned ceaseless demonstrations against it---innocent citizens were shot and killed in the process, only for them to come to power and rather increase the levy. You were incensed by the fact that they promised Petrol was going to be reduced from 64 pesewas, only to have it increased to astronomical heights. You would remember that cocaine became a big issue in Ghana; the New Patriotic Party lost its name to its critics; they came to be christened the Narcotic Peoples' Party. This unfortunate tag gained currency with the disappearance of cocaine in police custody and the arrest of Hon. Amoateng. The notion that the Flag-bearer, Nana Addo, was a drug addict became the icing on the cake. You complained bitterly of your bad living conditions and genuinely ranted change from your roof tops all over the country. So in year 2008, you kicked the NPP out!

Today one might ask that what has changed and your answer is as good as mine-Nothing! The NDC deprecated in very strong terms their opposition to talk tax, but what happened- they chose silence as soon as they captured power. The Tor Dept Recovery Levy (TDRL) was scrapped immediately after the assumption of office but has been reintroduced, this time with as much as 300 per cent increase. This is not all, they are also caught in the Cocaine web just like the NPP. Through wikileaks, we woke up one morning to realise that President Mills is worried that “elements of his government are already compromised...”

Laying credence to long standing suspicions, the same source revealed that in a December 2007 cable “embassy contacts in the Police Service and the President's office have said they know the identities of the major barons, but the government of Ghana does not have the Political will to go after them”.

As far as we are concerned, the drug menace is a national issue and because it is, it is also political. Parties either won or lost elections on this. We must make the point that as things stand, the CPP is the only credible political alternative standing.

As many Ghanaians have rightly and severally observed, NPP and NDC are the same. Both have failed Ghanaians and both are Social Democratic parties. Whilst the NPP covertly practice it, the NDC overtly exercise it. Social Democracy is a compromise on Capitalism. They believe in the preservation of the capitalist system of exploitation, they endorse privatisation and believe in the competitive price biding of the market forces. In short, social democratic parties are undisclosed centre right adherents. We have no problem if they will be honest to themselves and Ghanaians. Choosing between humans and figures, the two parties have proven over and over again to believe in the latter. The human index question makes no sense to them. That is why the NPP would follow a ghostly single digit inflation that eluded them throughout its 8 year administration and that is why the NDC have done everything including freezing public sector employment and increasing taxes to keep the people poorer just so that they can tell the world-“we have single digit!”

A few have maintained that voting for any other party apart from the NPP and NDC will amount to a waste of vote. We will accept this fallacy just for a moment if the objective of voting is to be on the winning side. But we all know there is more to voting than just that; people have expectations, hopes and dreams and by voting we deliver our mandate to a party or individual whose programme provides, by our estimation, the best promise of meeting our needs; it is about resolving the concrete problems that confront you and I. So logically there is no reason why we should keep giving our mandate to Parties that keep breaking their promises. It is when we keep voting such Parties that we waste out votes, not when we vote the CPP and it doesn't win. How would you term voting out the NPP because the price of petrol shot through the roof; and voting in the NDC and experiencing same? What do you say to the poultry farmer who was once the largest producer of poultry only to become the largest importer of poultry having voted in another party? When we begin to look at things from this perspective, politicians in Ghana would have no choice but to honour their promises. As it stands now, they would always insult our intelligence.

Happy fm, a private radio station broke the story of a newly constructed toilet facility in the King Tackie Tawiah cluster of Schools. Since 2006, it has not been commissioned because the contractor has not been paid. Two years before the NPP handed over in 2008 and two years after 2008—under two separate parties, the toilet stands there like a white elephant in ribbons. These children aged between five (5) years and 14years pass by it into the bushes during the day, into the gutters during dawn to go answer nature's call. What would the children think of you (who has the right to vote) when they hear you say that to vote out both parties is a waste of your vote?

Ernesto Yeboah
Director, Conscious Africa Network
[email protected]
January 9, 2011