[ 2016-12-12 ]

NDC didn’t heed Rawlings’ advice – Lecturer
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) was adamant
in listening to the advice given to them by Jerry
John Rawlings, its founder and former president of
Ghana, ahead of the elections hence their defeat,
Dr Mohammed Abass, a political science lecturer at
the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and
Technology, has said.

His comment follows the defeat of the NDC in the
just-ended presidential and parliamentary
elections. During the elections, Nana Addo Dankwa
Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party (NPP)
defeated President John Mahama with a landslide,
securing 53.85 per cent of the votes while his
main contender got 44.40 per cent as announced by
the Chair of the Electoral Commission, Charlotte
Osei.

Speaking in an interview with Accra News on
Accra100.5FM on Monday December 12 on why the NDC
may have lost by such a wide margin, Dr Abass
said: “Before the elections, we all knew the
situation on the ground with regards to the
challenges that citizens and voters were facing.
We also knew the government’s deficiency and
shortfalls. The NPP was able to package all these
challenges and deficiencies of the NDC-led
government and summarised it as incompetence,
hammered on that to appeal to the minds and hearts
of the citizens. I believe this was a major factor
that caused the defeat of the NDC.

“In the case of the NDC, instead of listening to
the concerns of Ghanaians and acting accordingly,
they were rather defending, reacting to, and
countering the comments of the NPP.

“During their last congress in Cape Coast,
former President Jerry John Rawlings told them
they didn’t have to fight the NPP on their own
terms, that it would be a wrong approach and that
they were not going to win the elections if they
did that because the NPP is better at those things
than they are. And so JJ Rawlings saw this defeat
ahead of the NDC and cautioned them, but they did
not listen to him, and that has resulted in their
defeat.”

He explained further: “They (NDC) did not listen
to their founder’s advice at all. During the
congress, their founder did not speak that much,
he only cautioned the NDC to focus on their own
strategies as well as the shortfalls that the
citizens were pointing out about the government
– issues of corruption, unemployment, high cost
of living. These were the real challenges that
confronted Ghanaians, but they did not focus on
them to give hope to Ghanaians, they were always
focusing on the NPP and just attacking Nana Addo
Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

“All these are good lessons to them that you
don’t win elections by focusing on your
opponent’s seemingly physical shortcomings
because it doesn’t add anything to you. They
should have focused on the deficiencies that a lot
of Ghanaians found with the government. All that
they could say was ‘Toaso’ (Vote for
continuity). Are you going to ‘toaso’ the
hardship, power outages, unemployment or what?
Obviously Ghanaians did not see what was there to
‘toaso’.”

Source - Classfmonline

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