It is abundantly clear to all who have heard him speak lately, that former President, Mr. Jerry John Rawlings, is yet to get over his alleged mistreatment at the hands of certain elements in the party he founded, the NDC.
He continues to seethe and fume in anger, at times seemingly out of control, railing against those he now considers his mortal enemies.
I sympathize to a certain degree with Mr. Rawlings. He has every right under the sun to bear a grudge, to harbor that intense dislike and bitterness he occasionally demonstrates, publicly towards his former colleagues.
Of course, it is an open secret, public knowledge that Mr. Rawlings has, in fact, been treated shabbily, grossly disrespected and endlessly vilified by some knuckleheads in the NDC.
Suffice it to say there is no love lost between the former military strong man and a few hotheads in the party.
The knuckleheads, I am referring to here, are primarily younger members of the party, who are in the main, petulant, boisterous and condescending.
They tend to view older members of the party as ancient relics, dinosaurs whose time has long passed and therefore deserve to be shunned and cast aside.
These young bucks are, from all indications, pitifully ignorant of the many sacrifices the former president made to hold together a party together that was still in its infancy and faced existential challenges from within and without.
Rawlings is certainly not an angel, with a scrupulously clean record or background. He has his faults, plenty of them, too. He is a firebrand, quick to throw the first punch.
We all remember, too well, the excesses of the two revolutions he spearheaded in 1979 and 1981 respectively. But I believe he atoned for his misdeeds, and Ghanaians with their proverbial magnaminity forgave him and moved on.
But, lets be clear-eyed here; the NDC is Rawlings creation, it was his labor of love. Be that as it may, if he sees or senses anything untoward going on in the organization, he is not going to clam up, shut up and go to sleep. He will venture his opinion.
And, boy, has he done that on several occasions, intentionally and deliberately sabotaging his own creation!!!
Let it be said loud and clear that the hostility between the former president and some members of the party is unhealthy and inherently destructive.
It is undermining its ability to be a brutally effective opposition party besides slowly killing its chances of regaining power from the ruling NPP.
What is more, the party is being deprived of the quality leadership it urgently needs to harness all the resources, human and material, to win back the support of Ghanaians.
My hope, and that of millions of other Ghanaians is that Mr. Rawlings and his opponents will place the interests of Ghanaians above theirs and get their priorities right.
Our country can least afford to have a major opposition party in disarray. It will be an epic, a huge disservice to our democracy experiment.
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