Misguided priorities cause of NDC’s defeat – Amaliba

A member of the legal team of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) Abraham Amaliba has stated that the party’s painful lost in the 2016 election was due to some terrible decisions taken during campaigning.

Speaking Monday June 12, 2017 on Morning Starr, he said “The problem we had was because we did not actually engender some kind of good will come from our grassroots because we have left them behind.”

The NDC lost the 2016 elections miserably to then opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), making John Mahama the first ever sitting president to have lost an election in the Fourth Republic.

Mr. Amaliba’s comments were in reaction to former President Jerry John Rawlings’ calls for unity in the party Saturday June 10 at the 25th anniversary celebration of the NDC.

According to him, for the NDC to recapture power in the 2020 elections there is the need to refocus its attention to its grassroots.

He said: “We have won four out of the seven elections. And so as you rise and you ride high, the tendency is for you to forget your grassroots and… if you leave your grassroots you will still have the people behind you.”

But, he said following the party’s humiliating defeat in the 2016 election “the reality dawned on us after the elections [that] nope, you needed to deal with your grassroots…”

He said the NDC was betrayed by electorate “feigning” their interest towards it and when it mattered they stuck to their roots.

He cited the one million votes campaign in the Ashanti region as very disturbing mistake committed by the party during the elections.

“You have been there for eight years, you think that you have been able to reach out to other people who were not part of you. Not knowing that these other people who are not part of you were only just feigning interest in your party. But they will still go back to vote the way they vote,” he told the host Francis Abban.

“And so, some of us even said that look, part of the defeat is because we concentrated in areas that will never vote for you and nonetheless we were still thinking that they will still come on board. The 1 million vote in Kumasi and then we went to 1.5 million was nothing that I think we could have done. We should have concentrated [on our base]. Because we have won elections with our base and so I think that we should have deepened that relationship rather than thinking that we could go into other areas…as we did that we sort of forgot our grassroots,” he added.