Opinions of Wednesday, 8 November 2017

Columnist: Daniel Osei

Unity walk or Disunity walk

John Dramani Mahama and other participants at the Cape Coast Unity walk John Dramani Mahama and other participants at the Cape Coast Unity walk

A beautiful idea meant to help bring the party together has now been hijacked by the Mahama camp and Sunday’s was no unity walk. It was rather a disgraceful spectacle which sadly, will only entrench and advance the divisions in the party. Indeed, you can't teach an old dog, new tricks. John Dramani Mahama has nothing new or good to offer our NDC.

Look at all the headline stories coming out of the walk. Ask yourselves, was Mahama the only aspirant or party leader who attended the program? Why did they actively prevent others from speaking and the only choice they had was to leave prematurely to avoid a fight? Will this conduct help unite the party? None of them will attend anymore of these fake walks and the word will soon get out this clown act is a sham.

Why did Stan Dogbe have to hold the stand the entire time and the only wireless microphone given to Allotey Jacobs with instructions to hand over to Mahama and only mention names of the potential aspirants with planted persons to hoot and boo at the mention of their names to set the stage for JM to speak? He faithfully executes the plan and Mahama speaks alone. Ask yourselves how does this help unite anything?

The sad truth is we've seen this movie before. Leading up to the 2016 elections, chant of "Mahama has won already" made the party and in particular the campaign organizers and engineers oblivious to the real situation on the ground. It made it easy to dismiss meaningful recommendations and we saw the results; Mahama gave us the worst margin of defeat in our history as a party and country.

This internal vigilantism to impose Mahama and the constant ‘Trumpian’ imposition of Mahama as our "surest" bet, is so nonsensical we must reject it and save our party. The same engineers who designed and implemented our terrible defeat are now in charge of engineering Mahama's return as flag bearer and repeating the same mistakes. Are they so brainless to anticipate those close to the stage, saw the happened on the platform and others in the crowd will wonder why none of the other aspirants spoke? Don't they know people talk and people are talking? Surely, they can use their media connections to dominate the 24/48-hour news cycle but "3pro aa, y3 b3ti no kankan" to wit; when it rots, we'll surely smell the scent. The last time we tolerated and endured this crap, we had a waif of the nasty scent of defeat and the worst margin of defeat (one million votes) for a sitting president. Unheard of in our country's political history.

Of the four potential aspirants on stage on Sunday, it shouldn't take much to know we forced the worst of them all on us. Only one has been flag bearer before and he bombed miserably. In 2012 as our flag bearer, Mahama cost us seats and votes in "his constituent region" of northern Ghana. He had four years to engage corrective measures but did nothing. Consequently, in 2016 as flag bearer, he lost, even more, seats and votes in his constituent region because you can't do the same things and expect different results. The worst part is, this time, he lost as an incumbent president.

Is it so difficult to see that any of the others on stage is worth trying and certainly much better than Mahama? What was inspirational about his speech yesterday? Look at the crowd and ask if they were energized. Mahama is fanning out his own flames and it's shameful. He wants to take down the NDC and make it another CPP and we must reject it.