Opinions of Monday, 25 April 2011

Columnist: Amenga-Etego, SaCut

Open Letter To President Mills ....

­ ....A VOTE FOR YOU WILL SPELL NDC¹S DISASTER

Dear President Mills,

Warm regards and season¹s greetings to you from one of your party youth who
has followed your reign and written several letters to Your Excellency,
expressing my most sincere views and opinions regarding the current state of
affairs in the NDC party and government. Your blind loyalists and supporters
who accuse me of insolence in my open communication with the President of
the land have chastised me in the past. I am sure they are confusing my
plain courageous talk with insolence. Nonetheless, I have taken notice of
that, and therefore will choose my words carefully, albeit succinctly.

But let it be on record; I am not anti-Atta Mills as people have
conveniently been peddling around. I have simply been against many of your
decisions, actions/or inactions, choices and utterances based on the
principles that I know should guide you as a president from the NDC party. I
believe in giving people the chance to try. I have voted for Prof Mills
since 2004 and I will vote for you again if in the unlikely event that NDC
delegates genuinely decide on July 8 that you should continue to lead the
NDC to the 2012 general election because, then, my loyalty to the NDC will
leave me with no choice. But I am working against that happening because I
believe you have tried your very best but your effort is not enough and your
aptitude on the job has been appalling - to say the least. Your mandate
cannot be renewed by any prudent people - unless we want disastrous results
in the 2012 general election. The NDC party can offer better leadership to
Ghanaians than that which we get from you President Mills right now.
Mr. President, the last time I wrote to you was mainly to lament your
impregnable resolve to ignore wise counsel and unarguably rich experience
from the NDC founder and former President Jerry John Rawlings - the man who
gave you the greatest opportunity to political office. I also decried the
last time obvious instances of your attempt to shift away ­ insensitively -
from the very fundamental ideals, values, principles or moral virtues that
form the bedrock of the NDC of which you lead incompetently right now.
I particularly challenged your Excellency to openly demonstrate your loyalty
and conviction to the NDC ideals. I even suggested to the chagrin of your
blind supporters and avowed loyalists that your NDC ID card is taken away
from you by the party¹s secretariat for treating the NDC ideals with
disdain. I still stand by this today because the situation has worsened.
Only this time, I am asking the NDC delegates to reject your bid to
perpetuate your reign of ineptitude.

Mr. President, it is also obvious that you¹re exploiting religion - or
Christianity - as Œopium of the masses¹ to create the false impression in
the minds of Ghanaians that you are a good man, and the rest of us who are
making different suggestions including the NDC founder are bad people. I am
not sure what moral code that guides your leadership decisions, which
encourages you to shake hands with the murderers in our society? I don¹t
know which moral code guides you to sit down with the plunderers of our
national resources? I don¹t know Mr. President what moral code guides you to
hang your opponents or enemy¹s picture on your wall and regard him as your
hero? What moral code encourages you to abandon your original context, even
denying the sacrifices of your benefactors prior to your assumption of
office as president? What morale code teaches you to refuse to keep your
word to the people whose benevolence put you in office, and yet, expecting
unconditional following?

Yes, by all means, let God help you fight. And yes, let God be your guide
for ultimate goodness. But like King David in the Bible who went to fight
Goliath the Philistine giant with Œguidance from God¹, he still went to
battle with a sling and a stone - even a knife so he could cut off the head
after killing Goliath - just in case. That was King David¹s idea. Not God¹s.
Yet God was with him. President Mills where are your Œown arms¹ to succeed
as president apart from God¹s guidance? I don¹t believe you have any, and
that¹s why you should be giving way now for a new leader of the NDC.
I want to ask you Mr. President; have you ever had your Chief murdered in
broad day light before your very own eyes? Or your brother brutally murdered
in military detention for exercising his right of political association and
without any justice? Have you ever been sacked from your job, and your wife
and children unable to feed, and are destitute for a bed to sleep all
because you believed and espoused the ideals and principles of the National
Democratic Congress or because you don¹t belong to the New Patriotic Party?
Have you ever gone homeless from not paying your rent because you worked for
GHANA AIRWAYS which got run down and liquidated by public/NPP government
officials based purely on avarice and who shared the state assets and set up
their own private caricature called GHANA INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES? If you
have not Mr. President, then you are not a judge of those who have - the
people you have denied. But if you have, and yet, you still shake hands with
these murderers and plunderers, saboteurs and pure criminals then Mr.
President you don¹t deserve your title. And any leaders who do this
obviously have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant. That
answers why Mr. President, you only listen to those who sing your praises
and you disregard - with disdain - some of us who refuse to flatter you
since it is neither in our nature nor nurture to do so.

I hope you are not surprised at the level of internal resistance to your
reign of exclusionism, unfaithfulness, ingratitude, vindictiveness,
disloyalty or rather obscene loyalty, betrayal and usurpation, lack of
courage to do what is prudent? I sincerely hope you couldn¹t be naïve to
assume that after all this betrayal; the people will remain unquestionably
loyal? You choose to align yourself with the few nobles around you -
preferring to please them and prove your Œmanliness¹ and independence.
The power came to you from the people and you can¹t resist it when they are
forced by your actions to desert you. Not even your orchestrated farcical
nationwide endorsements from a few Œsquealers¹ in your team can sway the
power of the people. This resistance is coming in the form of a whirlwind in
a storm. And it is led by the youth with a consecrated determination to
restore integrity, loyalty and unity. We also intend to make history in the
process. Between and above all, this resistance, unprecedented as it may
be, should lead to the restoration of the TRUE NDC VALUES without compromis
e- those that you have conveniently buried since you became president.
What sort of people have you surrounded yourself with Mr. President? Are
these the finest people you can find to help you achieve your goals? Or
these are the loudest praise singers? How can these people say in opposition
that they want to change the Œrevolutionary vocabulary¹ of the NDC through
the Œnew NDC¹ where words like ŒCADRES¹ were replaced in our manifesto
language with ŒFOOT SOLDIERS¹ (one who fights principally on foot, not a
vehicle) and today in power; these same people including the Vice President
John Mahama, National Chairman Dr. Kwabena Adjei, Nii Lante Vanderpuije,
James Agyenim Boateng and many others have publicly posited that the people
called FOOT SOLDIERS don¹t exist and that it is completely alien to the
NDC. They now say that the mass followers of the party are known as CADRES
and not FOOT SOLDIERS. They want to wish away the people who gave you power
by changing their name. They are so idle they now even play with words.
Convenient! What sort of CADRES who disassociate themselves with June 4
anniversary or 31 DEC. movement anniversary commemoration? Then which
revolution are you defending? Is this the so-called Œnew NDC¹ who think
that sitting in vehicles with president Mills and moving around the country
make them the greatest contributors to the NDC 2008 victory and therefore
deserve the most privileges and courtesies under this administration -
greater than those who made it on FOOT, organized on the ground, walked from
house to house, bringing the crowds to listen to the message and faced all
the hostilities of the opponent, and kept the vigil at every polling station
around the nation on election night to ensure the sanctity of the ballot?
How much more naïve can your team become? Please tell Koku Anyidoho to
redirect his mis-communication from the castle.
The bid of NANA KONADU AGYEMAN-RAWLINGS is a necessary and natural response
to the resistance being put up at the grass roots against your
establishment. Someone must rise to the occasion - and timely too. And I
believe the woman can do it, which is what we all want - someone who can do
it. The resistance is not coming from the AIRWAVES. And that is why is it
not only futile, but a waste of everybody¹s time to try to quell the
people¹s resistance from the AIRWAVES and/or mass media with these farcical
endorsements. In my books, these panic reactions from day one when the signs
began to appear on the walls of an eminent challenge to the NDC leadership
only exposes President Mills as an effeminate leader who definitely does not
inspire, and is not admired by the mass followers of the NDC including
myself. This gives more credence to the need to change leadership in our
party, to go for a stronger, more courageous personality we can trust.
Mr. President, There are those few who flatter you and will continue to do
so. They have been flattering you all along in order not to lose their
crumbs. What you needed to do was to listen to the unflattering voices
within the party - the true voices that gave and can take away the power
from you. But your own nature and your flatterers have succeeded in
disallowing you from remembering this important TRUTH. And now Mr.
President, you have to find the words in the spirit of TRUE DEMOCRACY to
convince the delegates of the NDC on why you should not be rejected and
ostracized by the party for giving us a cowardly heart and a sycophantic
spirit for leadership. And please Mr. President, you cannot find refuge in
ŒMONEYCRACY¹ because the soul of the NDC is not for sale.

Courageously yours,

SaCut Amenga-Etego
(YFL General Secretary and NDC Youth activist)
020-726 7072
Yfl_ghana@yahoo.com