NDC must stop ‘renting’ crowds - Former minister tells party

A former Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Alhaji Inusah Fuseini, has urged the National Democratic Congress (NDC) party not to encourage the practice of crowd-sourcing at its events, especially rallies and unity walks.

According to him, crowd-sourcing will not give the NDC the right picture on the ground as regards its membership size.

The NDC, after suffering a humiliating defeat in the 2016 general election, begun the ‘Unity Walks’ across the 10 regions of the country, which is targeted at closing the ranks of the umbrella family and building bridges that were broken in the party before and during the 2016 electioneering.

The walks have seen thousands of party members thronging the streets and participating in the exercise, with some political analysts questioning the source of the milling crowds as to whether they were indeed members of the party in the respective areas the walk has been organised or that the crowd was bussed from elsewhere.

Speaking to Bola Ray on ‘Starr Chat’ on Starr FM, Mr Fuseini argued that it would be important for only Kumasi members of the NDC to partake in the upcoming ‘Unity Walk’ slated for the Ashanti Region in order to know the party’s membership base.

“I believe that people in Kumasi must organise the ‘Unity Walk’, that’s how we’re going to know our real strength on the ground.

“Crowd-sourcing doesn’t give us the real picture on the ground. Looking back, you ask yourself so what happened after Cape Coast, then what happened after Accra, where are all those who filled the stadia or stadium in Accra? So looking back it didn’t give us our real strength, so when we lost disastrously in Accra, that number we saw was not reflected.”

Background

It would be remembered that portions of the Dr Kwesi Botchwey’s report on events leading to the loss of the party in 2016 general election said in the run-up to the crucial elections, the NDC, with state resource at its disposal, formed many splinter groups to promote the second term bid of President John Mahama.

Groups likes ‘Girls Girls for Mahama,’ ‘Zongo Girls for Mahama,’ ‘Zongo for Mahama,’ ‘Youth for Mahama,’ ‘Celebrities for Mahama,’ and ‘Doves for Mahama’ were formed with massive resources from the Flagstaff House to prosecute the agenda, which failed woefully in the end as Ghanaians overwhelmingly rejected then candidate Mahama.

The committee further recommended that the party needed to reconnect with its social democratic philosophy and further pointed out that the NDC had a weak intellectual and research base and recommended that steps be taken to crowd the party with critical thinkers instead of funding crowds.