Sixth-five-year-old Nana Akufo Addo, last Tuesday threw caution to the wind, and made one of the most belligerent speeches from a Ghanaian politician which was liaised with very resentful tribal sentiments and a warmongering posture which can badly diminish his chances of becoming President of Ghana, come January 7, 2013.
At a meeting in the Eastern Regional capital, Koforidua, where he met with some members of the New Patriotic Party as part of his nationwide tour with some of the national executives of the party, Nana Addo ranted:
“They say we Akans are timid and cowards so when one or two of us is overawed, we all recoil. Well, we will see!”
He said: “We exhibited a taste of our warring at the Atiwa By-Election. Let all understand that our Party was founded by men of gallantry.
The founding fathers of this party which today has become the biggest political movement in Ghana, were not men who hid under beds; therefore, the nerves we have in us will come to bare in the 2012 Election which will be “All Die Be Die, All Die Be Die. ”
His posture vindicates Mr. Fiifi Kwetey’s position that Nana Addo who used the expression, “I Believe In Ghana” as his campaign slogan for the 2008 election, is a violent person and that his thugs beat up one NDC sympathizer, Abu Mohammed, in the Akim Abuakwa South, crippling him in the process, and also left an NDC office in that constituency burnt down.
NPP’s Presidential Candidate, is already heavily reeling under claims that he uses drugs, he is very arrogant, he is not an ideal husband and a father, because he is also wildly into women.
These claims bitterly caused him the 2008 presidential election, so in the light of this, one expects him to be circumspect in his choice of words but with his recent pronouncements, the presidency may, for now, remain a mirage for Nana Addo.
But receiving cheers from some party faithfuls in attendance, he went on:
“We are prepared and ready for them,” Nana Addo stressed that the riotous action the NPP exhibited at the Atiwa By-Election in 2010 was the beginning more unrestrained, and perhaps, violent disturbances Ghanaians are to foresee in the 2012 Election.
Nana Addo said nobody in Ghana is superior and a better warrior than the other “because God created us all equally”, stressing that the NPP would do whatever it would cost them to stand resolute in the 2012 Election “because Ghanaians need us back in power”.
Leading members of the NPP have made such worrying comments in the past with respect to the 2012 general elections.
One of the founding fathers of the NPP, Dr. Nyaho-Nyaho Tamakloe, recently declared that the 2012 Election would be fought by the NPP as ‘Guerilla Warfare.’
The National Youth Organiser, Anthony Kabo, has also said that the 2012 election would be bloody, and that the NPP would violently turn Ghana into Afghanistan if the NPP is not declared winners of 2012 elections.
The National Organiser, Alhaji Muktar Bamba, has also made it clear that he is training thugs to be referred to as Bamba Boys whom he would be deploying on Election Day to deal with the Tamale-based Azoka Boys of the NDC.
His predecessor, Lord Commey, had earlier revealed that the NPP has a group within the party called “Action Troopers” which snatches ballot boxes from Polling Stations.
Nana Addo’s latest comments come in the wake of an earlier one in which he said ‘the militants on our side would rise’.
A family source has told The Herald that Nana Addo is getting frustrated with thoughts that he might end his political career without becoming President.
But Malik KweKu Baako Jnr speaking on Metro TV’s Good Morning Ghana programme (Thursday) down played the speech which has been widely condemned, saying that there is nothing wrong with it and that the NDC is using propaganda to blow the speech out of proportion as very inciting and ethnocentric.
He read a 2008 press statement issued by the NDC National Organizer, Yaw Boateng-Gyan and comments by Dr. Tony Aidoo on a Radio Gold programme which his paper, the Crusading Guide reported, and insisted that the NPP flagbearer’s speech can be likened to the Positive Defiance Speech made by ex-President Jerry John Rawlings upon which he was invited to the headquarters of the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI).