Mahama shouldn't have hijacked NDC – Ex-NDC Executive

A former executive of the Tema East constituency branch of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Stephen Ashitey Adjei, has said the NDC has been under hostage and that this has been the party’s undoing.

In a statement released to the media on Thursday, Mr. Ashitey Adjei, who is popularly called Moshake, said the captor of the party is non-other than former President John Mahama and that Mr. John Dramani Mahama has therefore become the author of the NDC’s problems.

“John Mahama should not have hijacked the NDC,” Moshake wrote, explaining that, “you can force a donkey to the river, but you cannot force it to drink.”

According to him, Mr. John Mahama may have hijacked the NDC but he cannot force all in the party to support him because people are just not happy with him as he has offended so many Ghanaians including members of the NDC.

“It would have been better, if he had just bowed out in line with the natural progression of things. Now that he has hijacked the party, all he is doing is forcing the whole bus to crash.”

The former NDC Constituency executive has been a plain-talking voice in the party, speaking truth to power in a way that no one can do.

Moshake has long maintained that Mr. John Mahama has become the undoing of the NDC after he used his presidency from 2012 to 2016, to basically mess up.

Explaining why he says Mr. John Mahama is a hijacker, Moshake wrote that through his time at the Presidency, John Mahama became rich and used the money he made to muscle out every one of the party’s presidential materials from becoming the party’s leader.

"In 2016, JM’s boys declared an aspirant for flagbearer unfit and managed to bulldozer his way through to become flagbearer because he was the sitting president and a cash cow."

“In 2018, he ousted the likes of Dr. Ekow Spio Gabrah, Sylvester Mensah, Prof. Joshua Alabi and others by taking advantage of very high candidacy filing fees that then pro-Mahama national executive had set for the presidential ticket,” Moshake wrote.

According to him, this annoyed all those involved and caused disaffection and subsequent alienation from active party activities.

“When all the candidates who wanted to replace John Mahama united and held a press conference decrying the fact that the deliberately high filing fees favoured only Mr. John Mahama, they were not speaking out because they had soar grape attitude, but because what they were saying was the truth.”

According to him, Mr. John Mahama at that time, would have done well to step aside because there was no way he could have won the 2020 elections but he did not.

“In 2020, John Mahama was not a winsome candidate for the NDC but he used his people in the party to set himself up as the party’s only worthy presidential material and again we lost by over 500,000 votes.”

Moshake lamented that because Mahama is the current presidential candidate, the NDC’s prospects of winning the 2024 election is still dim.

“Mr. John Mahama shouldn’t have used his influence and cash to “mafia” Dr. Kwabena Duffuor out of the last NDC presidential primary,” Moshake stated.

“The painful thing is that, if Mr. John Mahama had made way in as far back as 2016, we would have had a far better candidate that would have been well marketed by now, without all the baggage that Mahama carries.

So, it makes sense to believe that Mr. John Mahama has hijacked the NDC by carrying it on his head like a head-porter, something which is known in the local Ghanaian parlance as kaya-yoo.

He even deserves to be qualified as Konongo kaya because he can’t” win election for NDC and he does not want to pave way for the party to choose a new presidential candidate,” Moshake concluded.