The flag-bearer of the National Democratic Party (NDP), and former First Lady Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, has said she is not perturbed by the string of resignations that has hit her party in the past couple of days.

Nana Konadu told a group of journalists in Accra yesterday that she was in the presidential race to win the elections in December and take over from the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Nana Konadu is expected to file her nomination today ahead of the deadline for all presidential and parliamentary candidates for the December 7 polls.

Unconfirmed sources said Martin Alamisi Amidu was likely to be Nana Konadu’s running mate.

The wife of the NDC’s founder insisted that she was in the presidential race not necessarily because she wanted to split the vote of the NDC as being speculated.

The NDP, barely four months ago, broke away from the NDC amidst serious rifts between factions in the party.

“We cannot engage in destructive political banter while the people of Ghana are not certain whether their lights will be on today or not; we cannot engage in destructive political banter while a mother has to wake her six-year-old child up at 4am, feed her child hurriedly in order to get her child to school by 8am, and get herself to work by 9am, because very little effort has been made to ease the traffic congestion in our cities,” she stated.

At the media encounter, Mrs. Rawlings stressed the need to chart a new future for Ghana since “we cannot be politicking while our youth have no jobs, or while access to clean potable water is still a luxury, or while eating three times a day for the ordinary Ghanaian is still a dream”.

“The ordinary Ghanaian works very hard to earn a living, and yet hard work today is not rewarded because of the growing culture of nepotism and less [emphasis] on meritocracy” for which reason “we need to build a nation that respects honest hard work” because “people of this nation deserve the best, not better,” noted the NDP flagbearer.

“We cannot continue to engage in destructive political banter while people cannot live a life with value. We cannot continue this way because we do not have the luxury of time.

“Let us place people over politics, and start empowering people of this nation today, not tomorrow and definitely not in another four years. Today!” she stressed.

She emphasised the need to create equal access to education, potable water, healthcare, adequate housing, insisting that “every hard working Ghanaian has the right to own his or her own home.”

For her, the country’s most valuable resource is not its gold, cocoa or its oil, insisting, “We, all of us, are the most valuable resource of this nation. Our youth; our women; our children; our men; our elderly are the most valuable resource of Ghana, and therefore deserve to be invested in.”

To this end, she emphasized, “let us together take that bold step; let us seize this moment to chart a new future for Ghana”.

Carpet Crossing

Meanwhile, confusion has rocked the camp of the Rawlingses, with the latest being a resignation of two of their trusted aides, Emmanuel Saint Osei and Alhaji Mohammed Nasiru.

The duo announced its decision Monday afternoon on Accra-based Hot FM and quickly declared an unflinching support for President John Dramani Mahama, to the surprise of many, especially its other colleagues in the Rawlings camp.

Until their resignation, the two played active roles in the Rawlings camp, with Saint Osei serving as a protocol officer in Mr. Rawlings’s office, running errands for the former President whilst Alhaji Nasiru was also an active member of Friends of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings (FONKAR) which seems to have metamorphosed into the Mrs. Rawlings-led National Democratic Party (NDP).

Nasiru was an aide to Ekwow Spio-Garbrah before pitching camp with FONKAR.

They add to the several numbers of individuals including the likes of Dela Coffie, Ruth Sedor, Sidi Abubakar, Chris Dugan and the NDP’s interim general secretary, Dr Joseph Mamboah-Rockson, who have left the stables of the Rawlingses to join forces with government.

Somewhere last year, Dela Coffie, who used to be a member of the FONKAR and a staunch critic of the NDC administration, said President Mahama, who was then vice president, was so corrupt that he likened him to a person so easily enticed with money, like a fowl being lured with corn.

But many, including FONKAR’s Operations Director Ernest Owusu-Bempah, believe the two and their other colleagues who have fallen out with them were influenced by monetary considerations to take the decision.

He therefore described the action of the latest two to leave the camp as “an act of betrayal at the highest level” which he said would affect them politically.

Owusu-Bempah stressed the belief that his colleagues were bought since, “looking at what is happening, nothing has changed since Mahama took over; so what has gone wrong that these comrades of mine will just suddenly switch when things are getting worse and worse every day and the true principles that we fought for are still there.”

Owusu-Bempah, who is now a deputy director of communications of the NDP, was of the opinion that his former compatriots had hanged themselves politically. “…They’ve committed political suicide and they have written their political obituary,” he said.

Re-affirming his support for Nana Konadu, Owusu-Bempah said if Judas Iscariot had known that betraying Jesus Christ would lead to his glory being magnified, he would not have gone ahead with the decision.

“…some of us can never be bought; I am telling those people who are going round thinking money can buy everybody’s conscience that some of us can never be compromised,” he told Okay FM.