Opinion: Asiedu-Nketia Says Mahama Has Lost His Presidential Edge – By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Alban Bagbin

I will tackle this one in due course; I am referring to the virulent accusation by the longest-serving Ghanaian Parliamentarian, namely, Mr. Alban SK Bagbin, that the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the very political party that Mr. Bagbin has been a member of for the past 26 years, was run along the self-serving, hypocritical and discriminatory lines of George Orwell’s classic novel “Animal Farm.” But for now, let us deal with the quite serious observation that it was way too premature for the over 90 NDC Members of Parliament who were reported to have endorsed the Presidential Candidacy of Mr. John Dramani Mahama for the 2020 general election.

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This observation is in stark contrast with the summary prevention of the 40-something-year-old former NDC’s Youth Organizer from Oyarifa, Greater-Accra Region, Mr. George Boateng, who attempted to pick up nomination forms to run against then-President Mahama in the party’s presidential primary in the leadup to the 2016 general election. Mr. Boateng, who must be 47 years old now, succeeded in securing his nomination forms from his party’s Kokomlemle Headquarters, only to have the entire presidential nomination forms chucked into the shredder or waste bin and new ones reprinted. The former polling-station agent would be shortly expelled from the party. You see, the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress does not have an enviable track-record of democratic leadership.

For instance, the immediate successor of former President Jerry John Rawlings, then-Vice-President and later President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, was summarily selected and forcibly imposed on the rest of the party’s leadership and membership in what infamously became known as the Swedru Declaration. In the latter instance, the former Ghana Airforce’s Flight-Lieutenant had insisted, vehemently, that he would not brook any attempt by any party leader or member to challenge the candidacy of the former tax-law professor of the University of Ghana. At another time and in another country, all the 90-plus NDC parliamentarians who are alleged to have signed some papers or forms endorsing the second non-consecutive attempt at the Presidency by the former Rawlings’ Communication Minister, would have been electorally or politically targeted for removal from Parliament, for cynically daring to endorse the repeat candidacy of the most incompetent, corrupt, thievish and scandalous Head-of-State in the history of postcolonial Ghana.

Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, NDC General-Secretary

Already, some of the NDC’s MPs who are reported to have endorsed the candidacy of Mr. Mahama have claimed that they were deceived into appending their signatures to papers registering their unreserved approval of the candidacy of the man at least half of whose ministerial appointees, who also doubled as MPs, have been accused of criminally drawing double salaries, instead of the extra allowances mandated by the country’s Fourth-Republican Constitution. The case has been handed over to the police for quite sometime now. It is not known whether the criminal suspects involved will ever be arraigned before a legitimately constituted court of law to either jointly or severally answer for their official misdeeds. It is also important to highlight the fact that Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the career General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress and former Deputy Defense Minister, has never believed in the presidential competence or viability of his former boss.

In the wake of the 2012 Presidential Election, which was questionably declared in his favor by Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the extant Chairman of the Electoral Commission (EC), Mr. Asiedu-Nketia almost apologetically declared publicly in a radio interview that, in fact, the then-Interim President Mahama had not won the election, after all, but that the results had been flagrantly declared in the Gonja native’s favor because polling agents and other electoral assigns of the main opposition candidate, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, had not been vigilant enough. The problem with the purportedly massive endorsement of the former President by the NDC Parliamentary Minority is not premature as such. It is just that the former NDC-MP from Seikwa, in the Brong-Ahafo Region, has absolutely no confidence in the viability of the presidential candidacy of Mr. John Dramani Mahama.

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