I’m Running - Konadu Rawlings Tells NDC Elders

Sixty-two-year old Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings has told the Council of Elders of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) that she wants to be a candidate for the Party’s 2012 presidential election, according to information reaching the Daily Guide newspaper.

Mrs. Rawlings is reported to have officially declared her presidential ambition at a meeting of the NDC Council of Elders held in Accra last Tuesday and chaired by Harry Sawyer, a former Minister of Education.

Her meeting with NDC elders was considered as a traditional knocking ceremony, but the party bigwigs were so shocked to even utter a word. A source at the Tuesday meeting said when Nana Konadu made the announcement, no one breathed a word and a sudden cemetery-like silence enveloped the meeting while she gave a lecture on why she wants to be President of Ghana and vowed to pick NDC nomination forms when the time was due.

This is the first time Nana Konadu is reported to have personally disclosed her presidential ambition. She had hitherto hidden under the cloak of ‘party foot-soldiers who are mounting pressure on her to contest the flagbearership slot or forever keep her mouth shut in the affairs of the NDC.

Though the NDC has not opened nominations for its flagbearer aspirants, it had become clear that for close to a year now supporters of Nana Konadu have been on a full blast campaign to make her the NDC flagbearer, but her position as wife of the party’s founder and a national vice chairman of the party made the issue a thorny one.

Indeed, Nana Konadu has been touring cities and towns across the country, campaigning and galvanizing votes for the primaries, but she had explained her tour was part of party work and not to soften the grounds for her ambition as was being speculated.

Mrs. Rawlings has also been spotted with the frontline members of Friends of Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings (FONKAR), the pressure group that has a hallmark of running down President Mills in an apparent quest to make him unpopular for the flag-bearer primaries he says he would also contest. Nana Konadu has meanwhile not heeded calls from the NDC leadership that she should publicly distance herself from the ongoing campaign from the FONKAR group or better still shelve her gloves till nominations are opened.

At a stand-off meeting with the leadership, she is said to have denied she was campaigning ahead of time. The 2012 campaign posters of Nana Konadu were recently splashed all over the country, startling party gurus. This was followed by a campaign website launched on her behalf.

T-shirts have already been printed that show her as the candidate who will effect real change, with the front part reading, ‘I Believe in Nana Konadu’ and the back, ‘Change, Real Change’.

The website, run by FONKAR, has some photographs of Mrs. Rawlings in a pose that is alluring enough to galvanize votes for her.

The exclusive photos, 14 in all, captures Mrs. Rawlings dressed in different attires and posing like a fashion model with a charming smile.

She had a well powdered face with red lipsticks and blue eye shadow to match. In some of the photos, she looked like a professional working woman dressed in a designer suit and trousers while she appeared in other photos smartly dressed in traditional ‘kaba and slit’, the epitome of an educated African mother.

Though the NDC, as a party, has made some feeble threats on persons who start campaigning ahead of the party’s time table and opening of nominations, Dela Coffie, spokesperson of FONKAR has justified the launch of the website and admitted it is a clear campaign for Nana Konadu’s presidential ambition.

Dela has also called the bluff of NDC Chairman Dr. Kwabena Adjei who said the party would fish out and deal with the ‘unseen’ persons who are campaigning for Mrs. Rawlings without her consent. Mrs. Rawlings has not distanced herself from the activities of FONKAR. Though she is the type that does not hesitate to respond to issues bordering on her name and personality, she has strangely remained silent on this matter, leaving her foot-soldiers to battle it out in the media.

Daily Guide can also report that several persons who have donated to FONKAR either in cash or in kind have received letters of appreciation that has what is believed to be the true signature of Nana Konadu as well as new year messages for 2011.

A recently outdoored poster of hers displayed this message: ‘this year we the foot-soldiers of NDC wish everyone in Ghana a new year filled with hope for the future because of our new expectations - a hopeful new year for a bright future”.