Defections Galore

Defections Galore A FORMIDABLE face and name in the National Democratic Congress tasked by the leading opposition party to demolish the ruling administration in the party’s unrelenting divisive propaganda has defected together with other known names and faces of the NDC in the New Patriotic Party stronghold of the Ashanti region. Hatchet man Lukman Alaska, a serial caller who has been working for the NDC for the past eight years, says his reason for dumping the Three Johns and the NDC is based on the record of the NPP’s achievements and laudable policies.

In an exclusive interview in Kumasi when he was spotted in an NPP T-shirt during a rally by Nana Akufo-Addo’s campaign team in Asokwa constituency, Lukman stated: “My decision to join the NPP is as a result of the good programmes of the Kufuor administration, the clean campaign of the NPP and the personal respect for Nana Akufo Addo.”

To prove his commitment to work for the NPP, he said he is ready to retract all vile propaganda he has personally inflicted on the NPP leadership, Government and party as a whole.

“Indeed, I have personally embarked on an agenda to retract all the bad things I have been preaching against the NPP over the last seven and a half years. Then I shall go on from there to publicise the good works of JA Kufuor and the NPP as well as my deep respect for Nana Akufo-Addo as the next President of Ghana,” he stated amidst cheers from the milling crowd.

According to him, after all the negative propaganda against the NPP, he had come to realise that those demolition missions he embarked on at the instance of the leadership of the NDC would not serve any useful purpose, since he has personally benefited from the NHIS, Metro Mass Transportation System, personal freedoms, including the freedom of expression that allowed him to demolish the NPP free of charge and prosecution as well as the Capitation Grant and School Feeding Programme members of his own family are enjoying.

The eloquent and outspoken serial caller revealed that, as part of his duties to the NDC, he sent text messages to several radio stations in Kumasi and their affiliates in Accra, discrediting the good policies of the NPP and its leadership. He cited Angel, Nhyira, Hello, Peace and Adom FM stations as some of the key stations that he used to call daily to poison the electorate with vicious propaganda.

Surprisingly, the NDC, according to Lukman, never bothered to cater for him, whilst he championed their negative agenda against the NPP. His main task in churning out that vicious propaganda, he confessed, was to oppose every good policy of the NPP that has the potential of create a good image for the NPP among the ordinary citizenry. Significantly, Lukman’s defection has carried in its trial a series of pockets of defection in constituencies across the Ashanti region. Most of the defections occur among Zongos, where the NDC claim to have a formidable foothold. A conservative number of five strong activists of the NDC in the region are know to have joined the NPP in the region, with indications that more will follow as the NPP wound down its campaign in the region. The Zongo Boys who defected to join the NPP hail from the Ejura-Sekyedumase constituency. Also on the list of defectors is Osei Owusu, the NDC local secretary of Doyina in the Ejisu constituency.