Former President Jerry John Rawlings has described the newly elected leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) as a combination of “the good, the bad and the ugly.”
In an exclusive interview with Jonathan Donkor of the Ghanaian Times newspaper and published in the Thursday, November 22, 2018 edition, Mr Rawlings declined to put the individuals into the aforementioned categories except to say the combination was not uncommon.
He was a “little disturbed” about the absence of an indigene of the Volta Region among the new frontline leaders, although the region was deemed the ‘world bank’ of the party.
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A former vice chairperson of the party, Samuel Ofosu Ampofo grabbed the chairmanship after a keen contest with four other stalwarts of the party.
The incumbent general secretary, Johnson Asiedu Nketia, popularly called “General Mosquito”, defeated his deputy, Koku Anyidoho to retain the position he had held for a decade.
The entire congress, the former president said, was “not too bad, not too good”, as a result of which the calibre of leaders were elected by the about 9,000 delegates.
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He expressed his disapproval of what he described as the use of money to “corrupt the sanctity of the right of choice” at the various elections in the party adding that; “the misuse of money has undermined the force of our conviction.”
“The use of money to corrupt the sanctity of the right of choice is one of the worst mistakes we could have ever made,” he pointed out.
Former President Rawlings took the opportunity to clarify his unexpectedly short “one-sentence message” delivered at the Congress.
At the Congress, he said: “I can imagine we would wish to bring back the spirit of the old days. But that can only happen if we cultivate the habit of listening to ourselves.”
The latter, according to the former president, was the message he desired to send across but coded it to put the burden of “free-will” on the audience.
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“They were expecting me to blast them instead I put the burden of free will on them and their conscience.
“We are not listening to our inner voice, our conscience – that godly voice in our nature. If we were, we would not be making the terrible mistakes we have been making,” he clarified.
The movement, he said was to be a “Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to propel the values of probity, accountability, social justice,” stressing that it was not to be misunderstood to be a political party.