Face of Mahama government 'didn’t look too good' – Victor Smith

Ghana’s former High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Victor Smith, has observed that the image of the John Mahama administration at a point in time was unattractive to Ghanaians and may have accounted for the party’s massive defeat in last year’s polls.

According to him, the Ghanaian electorate at a point, especially in the run-up to the election, did not see the NDC government in good light due to the attitude of some appointees who were around the then president.

His comments follow concerns raised by Yaw Boateng Gyan, a former National Organiser of the NDC, that a lot of things went wrong with the party while in government.

Mr Gyan told Kumasi-based Abusua FM: “The other issue has to do with the way and manner our people were talking to the electorate…very arrogant and disrespectful. How would we have appealed to the voters?

“Some of us couldn’t talk because they said we had been voted out of the executive position of the party and so we shouldn’t talk… A lot of things went wrong.”

Commenting on these in an interview with Chief Jerry Forson, host of Ghana Yensom on Accra 100.5FM on Thursday March 23, Mr Smith, who was the NDC’s parliamentary candidate for Abuakwa North in the 2016 polls, said: “The affairs of government sometimes has to be attractive. John Mahama is a nice gentleman, but the people looking at our government saw that the attitudes of some people around the president did not speak well about us, and that could have accounted for the loss.

“…I can say that the face of the government at a point didn’t look too good. Leadership is not just the president; the party also has a role to play.

“At a point in time the kind of people who were the face of government looked like some small boys misconducting themselves, as someone like Yaw Boateng Gyan has said. At a point the president was being told that ‘people don’t see us well and that certain appointees of yours were irritating people’, and so it is possible that this had a negative effect on our performance in the elections.”