PERISCOPE DEPTH …With Our Publisher
(06/10/2021)
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”- Eleanor Roosevelt
One night in December, 2016, soon after the results of election 2016 had been announced, I was standing in front of my house at Achimota. The electricity was down, and darkness reigned, but I was in a euphoric mood. It was understandable. Over the past ten years, from 2006, I had set myself a personal target, to do everything possible to make sure that a certain gentleman called Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo became President of Ghana.
It was a personal battle in which I took no prisoners, and let no quarter. I committed myself, all the resources I could marshal, my business, my money, and my very being, to this battle.
It came with a price. It was to land me into ten days of prison custody, an unsolicited trip around the country under the guard of armed men toting AK 47 rifles, days of sleeping in very uncomfortable quarters among prisoners. In the course of that battle, I put my entire business concern, a newspaper, to the mill. I committed my reporters and staff, and exhorted them on the need to bring about a visionary leader who would take this country into an era of freedom hitherto unseen in this country.
I had an implicit belief in his capacity to bring about an as yet unheralded standard of governance to this country. So my euphoria was understandable.
So, there I was, standing in front of the home I rent, when this car stopped and a gentleman came out and approached me. It was a well-known reporter of this country. He stopped when he happened to see me. I will not state his name here, but he said words that have continued to stick to my mind to this day.
He said, “Ken, something monumental has happened in our country this December.”
When I asked him what it was, he said that, standing in front of my house at Achimota, in Accra, and looking right across the regions of Ghana, that is Greater Accra, Eastern, Ashanti, and up the border of Ghana at Dormaa Ahenkro in the then Brong Ahafo Region, the New Patriotic Party had won every single parliamentary seat. The electoral routing that December 2016 was so huge, that if the NPP had won just two or three additional parliamentary seats, that party could have had a democracy and constitution-threatening absolute Majority in Parliament. If the NPP had won those few seats more, they could have amended several key constitutional provisions. It was a dangerous victory. It threatened the constitution and democracy. The electoral defeat of John Mahama and the opposition NDC was absolute and classic. It was the type of victory on which a party could claim that it would be in power for fifty years. The NPP had routed the NDC with nearly one and a half million popular votes.
On hindsight, if anybody had made that statement, it would have been an absolutely reckless statement.
Why did Ghanaians reject the NDC so overwhelmingly? Today, in 2021, as the NPP heads towards election 2024, the NPP would be wise to answer this question for itself, sincerely. It would be wise to lift up a mirror, and look into it, and ask; is this really my image?
When my friend made that statement in front of my home at Achimota, I replied that I hoped that we, the New Patriotic Party, would not betray the hopes and aspirations that Ghanaians had reposed in us.
Has the NPP managed to maintain the faith that Ghanaians reposed in them?
I believe that the NPP should ask itself this question soberly, ask itself why Ghanaians so resoundingly and overwhelmingly rejected John Mahama and NDC in 2016.
Ghanaians did so for a number of reasons. Some of these reasons are;
They saw John Mahama virtually hijacking the entire Atewa Forest Range to give a one hundred and fifty billion dollar national asset to his brother.
They saw Ibrahim Mahama buying multi-million dollar fancy cars and parading it before them.
They saw the opulence, the hundred car convoys.
They were repulsed by the mansions and super mansions that sprung up virtually overnight all across the country.
They were repulsed by the talk of corruption, many linked directly to John Mahama.
These and many more propelled Ghanaians to vote for a resounding rejection of John Mahama and NDC.
Ghanaians reposed a faith in Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and the NPP, and when my friend posed the question, whether I recognized the great deed that had happened in our country, I replied soberly that I hoped we, the NPP, would not disappoint Ghanaians.
When I heard, that the NPP had actually sent a couple of its members to the United States to chase after a no-account person called Twene Jonas, I asked myself whether our party still had in contemplation the magnitude of the gift and faith Ghanaians reposed in us in December, 2016. Are we so lost, as to be spending resources on people like Twene Jonas, people who are merely speaking their mind? Have we lost so much focus?
When I hear the time wasting that we are engaging in over the LGBTQ debate, I wonder whether we have in contemplation the gift that was given us in December, 2016?
I wonder, if we, as a party in government, realize that we are just a stone throw away from the frightening possibility of giving Ghana, and the people (slaves) of Ghana, back to John Mahama?
Do we know what we are doing? The effect of our actions?
I am, indeed, sad for the New Patriotic Party.
(To be con’t.)
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