No sooner had President Onaapo John Dramani Mahama and NDC been defeated at Election 2016 than the NDC set up a Committee headed by Dr Kwesi Botchwey to find out why and how they shamefully massively lost the election. Whilst the answers were right under their nose, however, as clueless as they have always been, they were searching for them elsewhere, thus, afar, moving from region to region across the country.

Let me be fair but blunt with them on the reasons for why and how they lost the election so massively.

President Mahama and the NDC lost the election for a good number of reasons among which is:

The open corruption and/or thievery the President himself, his cronies, Government Ministers and appointees as well as their families were masterminding and orchestrating.

The disrespectfulness of the President himself and his government appointees towards the public. President Mahama publicly declared that he would take no advice on governance from any Ghanaian who had never been the President of the Republic of Ghana before. What an insult to the intelligence of the Ghanaian electorates!

The portrayal of callousness towards the people by the President and his government. The more the public was crying for relief from the economic hardships he was inflicting on the people, the more he was adding on to their financial burden by increasing utility bills and putting on the head of the citizens reckless “create, loot and share” taxes.

President Mahama and his government spending awful lot of money on hired radio-phone-in serial-callers to propagate blatant lies amid hurling insults on his political opponents.

The President sought to satisfy only a few people in Ghana including some traditional chiefs and loudmouths and hoped that was more than enough to win him re-election at any given time. What a myopic and incompetent leader he was!

The NDC’s open support for Alfred Agbesi Woyome, the medal winning Ghanaian swindler of the 21st Century was a recipe for disaster. Ghanaians were hell-bent on retrieving the money from Woyome whilst the President and his NDC-led government were shielding him.

President Mahama and his government took their NDC foot soldiers for imbeciles, thinking they would always be around to do their duty jobs for them, as lapdogs as they were taken for, despite the fact that the foot/fool soldiers were equally suffering from the same economic ravages like many other ordinary Ghanaians.

The NDC were using their radio stations and some radio programme presenters or hosts to throw dust into the eyes of the public. Same radio presenters were not only goading people to rain insults on the opposition parties and their leaders but also, to threaten to harm them, e. g. Mugabe of Montie FM radio with his would-have-been assassins Godwin Nelson and Alistair Gunn.

President Mahama embarked of open perpetration and perpetuation of political tribalism. He appointed about 70% of people of his northern and voltarian extraction into his government and to head all the government corporations although most of them were apparently incompetent and corrupt. What about his purposeful damaging of the businesses of those he took for political or tribal rivals?

The reasons are many but the few listed above will tell them volume about how they stupidly disengaged themselves from the majority of the Ghanaian public by their deceptively myopic policies.

On the question of how they lost the election, I have the following to tell. Instead of changing from their bad ways to engage the electorates on humanely terms, they vested more trust in their rigging machines they had set up in places only best known to them. They were sure of going to use the STL style of Election 2012 but as man proposes, God disposes. I will not go any further on this.

They thought their unholy alliance with the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Mrs Charlotte Osei, whose public utterances and the electoral laws and regulations she was churning out, as stupid and openly biased as most of them seemed to be, but obstinately insisting that they stand as they were with NDC continually concurring to them, was more them enough to guarantee them a win.

Instead of doing a proper campaigning which of course, not many people were going to buy their message as such efforts would have been too little too late in terms of their obviously gargantuan involvement in corruption, wasting the country’s money on silly things, coupled with the open embezzlement of public funds, they rested all their hopes in their installed-election-rigging machines. This is why former President Onaapo Mahama was always doing Usain Bolt whenever he mounted political platforms during the campaign. He was telling Ghanaians that he had gone ahead of his political rivals to win the election already. What a similitude of “Kwame Nyante, 3ko dadaada” campaign mantra of the 1969’s.

Why should I spend my precious time educating the NDC on why and how they lost the election? Am I a political consultant? Why should I offer them free consultancy?

If these reasons offered here free of charge are not enough to tell the NDC how they lost the election, then they must be very thick.

Rockson Adofo

(Written on Wednesday, 5 April 2017)