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Gross Incompetence and Crass Arrogance Toppled NDC in 2016

Feature Article Johnson Asiedu-Nketia
SEP 1, 2018 LISTEN
Johnson Asiedu-Nketia

Sometimes I wonder whether the career General-Secretary of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, is hooked up high on drugs. You see, the same wiry man called General Mosquito who emphatically claimed, in the wake of the 2012 general election, that then-Interim President John Dramani Mahama had, in fact, not won the presidential aspect of the election, but rather that Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the extant Electoral Commissioner, had announced the results of the Presidential Election in favor of Mr. Mahama because the latter’s main contender, then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and his polling agents and other electoral assigns had not been vigilant enough, now says that, in fact, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had won the 2012 general election, after all, because the party had retained all of its elected executive members at the party’s headquarters (See “Mosquito Blames 2014 Changes in NDC Leadership As a Major Factor to NDC Defeat” Modernghana.com 8/31/18).

In other words, if in the publicly stated opinion of Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, a Deputy Defense Minister in the government of former President Jerry John Rawlings, is that then-Interim President Mahama actually lost the 2012 Presidential Election, then it perfectly stands to reason for any levelheaded critic or studious observer to conclude that it made absolutely no difference whether any of the party’s executive operatives was changed or voted out of office in the leadup to the 2016 general election. One thing is clear from the foregoing observation, and it is simply this: The longtime Wenchi-East NDC-Member of Parliament ought to keep a record of most of his signal comments, especially those verging on election outcomes and results, if he is not to make a laughing stock of himself. The fact of the matter, if The Mosquito really wants to know, is that the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress decisively lost the 2016 general election to the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party primarily because both party and government had performed extremely poorly.

Consequently, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia inexcusably insults the intelligence of the Ghanaian voter by staking the rather vacuous claim that the Mahama-led NDC regime lost Election 2016 fundamentally because Dr. Kwabena Adjei, for just one striking example, had been voted out of party headquarters. The fact of the matter is that going into Election 2016, Dr. Kwabena Adjei, then-National Chairman of the then-ruling National Democratic Congress, as back as 2014, had made himself and his party a liability and very unpopular by churlishly attempting to intimidate Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood. Does anybody remember Dr. Kwabena Adjei’s politically threatening mantra of: “There are many ways of killing a cat”? In the main, Dr. Adjei’s threat had to do with the democratically and judicially righteous decision by the Supreme Court of Ghana to clean up the deliberately NDC-contaminated National Voters’ Register (NVR). I have forgotten precisely what the problem was with Mr. Yaw Boateng Gyan, who had also made himself so controversial that his continuous hold onto his position as the NDC’s National Organizer became increasingly indefensible.

But even more significant, if also inadvisably self-defeating, was the rather intemperate and insolent cautionary note to the very people who had made his presidency possible, that absolutely no Ghanaian citizen, including his two most formidable political opponents, namely, then-Candidate Akufo-Addo and the latter’s running-mate, Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, had a right to criticize the abysmally poor performance of the man who they personally placed into the erstwhile Flagstaff House, presently renamed Jubilee House, and entrusted with the sacred business of the people. You see, the Botchwey Report may not have mentioned the name of Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, but it is not necessarily because The Mosquito had performed his official duties with either inimitable flair or perfection or even sheer excellence. Rather, it very well may just have been that the members of the Botchwey Committee had simply not deemed Mr. Asiedu-Nketia to have been that significant to the operations of the party and/or the Mahama Presidential Campaign. Else, they could have at least mentioned the name of the party’s General-Secretary as a salutary mitigating or beneficent factor to the fortunes of the party, even in spite of its epic trouncing in the polls at the hands of then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
August 31, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]

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