It is absolutely true that following their 2016 humiliating election defeat, the NDC faithful have been undergoing a process of grief. The NDC loyalists have been indeed living in a denial.

Verily, we have been witnessing unbridled reactive emotional responses from the NDC diehard supporters ever since they lost the 2016 election.

We have also been observing a section of the NDC supporters repeatedly urging their leaders to do something about the painful election defeat.

Moreover, some of the grieving supporters have been lamenting ceaselessly: "We’ll not vote if you failed to bring “the former president” (Mahama) back ".

The worldview, however, is that the NDC leadership embraced the concerns of their teeming supporters and decided to embark on a series of unity health walks with the view to bringing all the disengaged party members together.

Regrettably, the NDC leadership are rather marring the process by throwing their unflinching support behind one potential presidential candidate to the disgust of the other potential presidential aspirants.

Ever since the NDC hierarchy decided to use a series of unity health walks with the view to diffusing the existential cleavage in their midst, every single unity health walk has rather meandered from one controversy to another.

The general belief however is that the unity walks have been designed to test their preferred candidate, Mahama’s popularity amongst the electorates.

Take for instance, despite the several protestations by the other presidential aspirants, Mahama continues to act as the primary speaker during the unity processions.

Given the circumstances, the inquisitive Ghanaians who have been questioning the use of the unity health walk as a conflict resolution tool are absolutely right in my humble opinion.

It is, indeed, quite baffling as to how and why unity health walks can help bridge the deep cleavage within the NDC fraternity.

Well, for the sake of balanced annotation, let us even agree that the unity health walk is novel. But the crucial question however is: how expedient and pragmatic is the supposedly novel idea?

Where is the evidence that the use of unity health walk, or assuming responsibility for inventing a supposedly bright idea from scratch, will be more pragmatic than ideas and data already developed by experts for resolving conflicts?

It would however appear that we were deceived big time by the NDC faithful. This is because until their recent unity health walk, we were made to believe that conflict is alien to the NDC Party.

Then the NDC leadership strangely turned around and informed discerning Ghanaians that they need a series of unity health walks to amend the deep seated conflict in their midst.

Bizarrely, they have been living in a denial all along. They concealed the pernicious conflict whilst in government.

Then the humiliating 2016 election defeat rekindled the deep seated conflict within their midst.

The all-important question we should be asking the NDC leadership then is: how could there be unity, since you are clearly throwing your support behind one contestant in the forthcoming flagbearship race?

Apparently, the ongoing tussle amongst the NDC loyalists over the choice of a more formidable flagbearer to lead the party to recapture the elusive power in 2020 is getting interesting by every minute.

While the Mahama loyalists are moving heaven and earth to have him return as the party’s 2020 presidential candidate, the loyal supporters of the other potential presidential candidates are insisting that Mahama was not up to the task during his tenure in office and must be replaced with a more competent flagbearer.

Given the rot in the erstwhile Mahama’s administration, it is not least surprising that some concerned supporters within the NDC Party are forcefully ventilating their arousing disgust over the anticipated comeback of former President Mahama.

More recently, a group of organisers within the opposition NDC beseeched the National Executives of the party to allow Mr Alban Kingsford Sumana Bagbin to go unopposed in the party’s forthcoming flagbearership contest (See: Alban Bagbin must go unopposed – NDC organisers; ghananewsagency.org/ghanaweb.com, 12/03/2018).

“So many people in the party feel Hon. Bagbin is the best person to lead us into 2020 and the reasons are pretty clear: he is the exact contrast to former President John Mahama in the matter of marketability and yet retains the Northern extraction that will satisfy the need to have a Northerner complete an eight-year mandate.”

The spokesperson for the group insisted that since corruption would be a key campaign theme in 2020 and the fact that former President Mahama administration had issues with corruption, Ghanaian voters would be forced to reject him if he was to be elected as the next flagbearer.

Even though the sceptics hold the preponderance of the argument about former President Mahama’s unsuitability for the 2020 flagbearership position, the diehard supporters of Mahama will somehow succeed in their quest to have him as their presidential candidate if he decides to accept their invitation.

In sum, we cannot be far from right for drawing an adverse inference that the vast majority of the NDC loyalists are living in a denial about former President Mahama’s unpopularity and will thus choose him over any other presidential aspirant.

Well, the crucial question one may ask the NDC faithful is: how are you going to persuade the aggrieved Ghanaians in 2020 to change their mind over the GH9.5 billion debt former President Kufuor left in 2009 and the outgone NDC government abysmally raised it to an incredible GH122.4 billion in just eight years?

Trust me, it will be easier for ‘a camel to go through the eye of a needle’ than for Mahama and NDC to convince discerning Ghanaians to forgive them, when their administration woefully shrunk Ghana’s GDP from $47 billion to $37 billion in five years.

How would the NDC supporters expect discerning Ghanaians to give Mahama and NDC another chance at the presidency when the erstwhile NDC government terribly dragged an economic growth of around 14 per cent in 2011 to a nauseating 3.5 per cent as of December 2016?

The NDC loyalists must accept the fact that discerning Ghanaians could not have forgotten the dreadful errors in judgement which culminated in economic hardships amid the unbridled business crippling ‘dumsor’.

In ending, the NDC faithful should take a deep introspection, and accept the fact that, the vast majority of aggrieved Ghanaians voted against the NDC and Mahama in the 2016 election due to the incompetence, the unbridle corruption and the unresolved dumsor which brought about harsh economic conditions.

K. Badu, UK.

k.badu2011@gmail.com