The National Democratic Congress is adrift, and that is putting it mildly; it is cannibalizing itself. Members have turned against each other and all kinds of verbal shots are being fired. It is not a pretty picture.
The party’s hierarchy is engaged in a battle of wits with the rank and file, and there is no end in sight to the madness. Needless to say, the party is imploding before a national audience and that is sad, really sad.
Still reeling from its stinging defeat at the hands of the National Patriotic Party in the December 2016 general elections, it looks like recovery from that electoral debacle is going to be a long time coming.
Three months after the humiliation, the party is still in the wilderness; slow to react, slow to revisit the pre-election blunders and make the appropriate amends. The inertia just adds fuel to the burning question about the party’s fortitude and stomach to take on the ruling NPP.
Granted, the party’s Election Review Committee headed by Dr. Botchway is hard at work, trying valiantly to find out what really cost the party the 2016 elections, but its efforts at doing just that are being stifled by internal party squabbles, the name-calling and finger-pointing.
An electoral loss should not be pinned on one individual or groups of individuals. Instead, blame should be apportioned proportionally…..the 2016 defeat was a collective failure on the part of every NDC member. Blaming the former president and his advisers for the party’s poor showing last December is mindless and imprudent.
Every member of the party, from Mr. Mahama on down……worked their tails off to get the party elected. But the odds were stacked against the party; the anemic economy did not respond to the treatment tenderly administered by Mr. Mahama, and worse, the NDC’s nemesis, the NPP wove an elaborate tale of promises and deceit and dangled it before Ghanaian voters, and it proved irresistible.
This is a pivotal time for the party to rearrange its musical chairs but it is behaving as if it has lost an irreplaceable asset……granted losing an election is not only embarrassing, it throws a party off its core message and leaves it stranded.
But the NDC should take heart; electoral defeat does not signify the demise of a political entity; if anything, it constitutes a temporal setback which can be remedied if the party redefines its policies and tailors its message to the needs and expectations of voters.
All in all, a lot is riding on the NDC’s ability to resolve its problems as quickly as possible…..Ghanaians need a party that is a viable alternative to the NPP.
If the NDC does not shake off its nostalgia for the glory years it was in power and consign last year’s trouncing to the scrap heap of history as one of those things that occasionally happens to political parties, and begin to seriously ponder its future as a revamped political entity capable of giving the NPP a run for its money, it will yet suffer another humiliation at the polls in 2020.
