Stalwart of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC), Prof. Kwamena Ahwoi says late President John Mills was vilified to death.

Delivering a lecture on Monday July 22, 2013 ahead of the first anniversary of Prof Mills’ death, Prof. Ahwoi said the late president’s decency as a politician was irksome to certain people who saw him as an obstacle in many ways.

According to him, “…President Mills endured undignified insults and vituperations from all sorts of characters in his time”.

He bewailed that President Mills’ critics deliberately brushed aside all shreds of reasoning and understanding of the late leader as a “good and decent” politician so as to malign him and denigrate his person.

“It was not as if these persons who indulged in this past time of infamy misunderstood the good professor. On the contrary, they perfectly understood him except that they knew that he was too good and too decent a person to be involved in the nasty and adversarial game of politics,” he argued.

Prof. Ahwoi asserted that Prof. Mills’ critics “wanted him out so that they could play the game on their own terms, a game that they thought only they understood and only they were entitled to play”.

He added: “Many of the insults were therefore intended and aimed at provoking the professor to quit” but Prof. Mills, according to Prof. Ahwoi, “constantly told friends who were close to him” that: “I am not a quitter and in any case I have to prove that there is a role for good and decent people as well in politics”.

Prof. Mills died on July 24, 2012 after he returned home from a medical trip to the US.