The National Democratic Congress (NDC) would need at this time try as hard as it could to forge unity among its rank and file, especially so, as all political parties gird their loin towards the next year political campaign festival climaxing into the December, 2012 general elections.
It is true that gaining back political stewardship of Ghana in January 2009, the NDC has performed and continues to perform tremendously good – in putting up together Ghana’s socio-economic infrastructure for a rocketing take-off, although what it inherited from the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP’s) 8-year rule led by President John Agyekum Kufuor was nothing worth writing home about.
Indeed, the swift infrastructural development springing up in every nook and cranny of the country would be the landmark and a yardstick that Ghanaians would use to measure the fingers that thumb-print the ballots between the NDC government in-power and other parties craving to replace it.
It is, however, true that a house divided can not stand the approaching storm: And since electoral politics strive on numbers, it is necessary the NDC begins as a matter of urgency to mend its perceived fence no matter what cost it involved.
The worse beyond imagination was the feudal nature of issues plaguing the very, very echelon; a nerve-centre of the party. This can be good for democracy as people think, but very bad for internal party cohesion.
That is why the Informer newspaper, would always stand at the middle of the Atta Mills’s Castle and Jerry Rawlings’s Ridge home with raised hands, and like an innocent soul caught in a battlefield’s crossfire, to plead with the leader of the NDC and president, His Excellency Professor John Evans Atta Mills on one hand, and the Founder of the NDC and former president, His Excellency Jerry John Rawlings on the other, to please, ‘drop the guns’ and sheath the swords.
The two personalities are like commanders leading legion of their army, and with a single purpose of victory in mind. The split of the two leaders, therefore, could put their single-purposed army, no matter how strong, in disarray, and also therefore, jeopardize its march to victory.
For the greatest interest people, as far as the NDC is concerned, are the grassroot supporters, sympathizers and floating-voters, who viewed the NDC as a savior-party and sacrificed for it in 2008, and still view it today as a force to reckon with – both as a political party and a government.
The most dangerous precedent, the Informer could reveal is that, should the actions and inactions of the two leading personalities and the siding groups, cost the vast followers of the NDC their hope, its ramifications would be thunderous.
This is the reason why, this paper thinks that, if by now, the party’s Council of Elders, made up of sages, had not yet realized the pending force cloud being gathered by the division of the NDC into Osu Castle and Ridge, then it is the time they take issues seriously.
The NDC as a political party; yes; has become bigger and would continue to become bigger than any individual. But the truth is that, the NDC must look beyond President Atta Mills and former president J. J. Rawlings and the 2012 elections, else posterity would question it.
So, in short; the time for NDC’s reconciliation must be now!