All Hail Ghana’s Rawlingses And ....

Their Eighty Seven (87) Bold Delegates, But..

"There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries." The preceding is a famous quotation from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. With these lines, Brutus advanced a strong and powerful argument about the need for bold, decisive action in ones life, when the time is right.

Life, like the ocean, is full of waves, currents and tides that come and go. Any good suffer knows that timing is an essential ingredient in success and subsequent glory. The question therefore is how does one know the right time to ride a tide? However important timing and tide selection are, they are subordinate to the individual performer's skills and ability. A person will always fail at an endeavor she or he is not equipped or qualified for.

On July 9th 2011, Dr Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings rode on her husbands arms into the National Democratic Congress’ (NDC’s) Sunyani special delegates convention, asking the party to boycott it’s sitting President and make her the flag bearer for the 2012 general election. Her stated qualifications were: loyalty to party and a ride on the coattails of her husband's nineteen (19) year rule. She made her case but when all votes were counted, only eighty-seven (87) delegates out of almost two thousand nine (2900) bought her argument to be bold. This article assumes that Mr. Rawlings, Mrs. Rawlings and their ‘town crier,’ Kofi Adams, all had voting rights and voted for candidate Nana Konadu-Agyemang.

For almost two years, the Rawlingses and their cohorts sold Ghanaians a mirage. They knew the country will not accept a Rawlings family dynasty so they concocted an elaborate hoax to slip Nana Konadu into our political discourse. Their narrative: She was being conscripted by millions of NDC foot soldiers against her own will to challenge President Mills. Groups like Friends of Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings (FONKAR), Organized Ladies of Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings (OLONKAR), Nana Konadu Network (NAKONET) and Get Agyeman Rawlings In (GARI) sprung up in the country creating the illusion of million supporting fans.

When Mrs. Rawlings resigned from the party’s vice chairperson position, the Rawlingses official story line was delegates all over the country were calling, pressuring her to take action and rescue the party "now.” Her husband, Mr. Kofi Adams and the candidate herself repeated this lie to Ghanaians ad nauseam. Finally, the cat is out of the bag. If spending thousands of cedis campaigning in every region of the country, got her only 87 votes, how many did she start out with in the first place? And how many delegates out of that paltry start-up number could have called to plead with her to run?

All hail the eighty-seven (87) bold delegates but it is not entirely clear whether Mrs. Rawlings' abysmal flop is attributable to wrong timing, her poor qualifications as a candidate or both. One thing is crystal clear. A lie can only take one so far! The numerous special groups and acronyms that the Rawlingses cooked up don’t amount to anything in real people support. If they had popular support as they claimed, why did Nana Konadu’s camp have such a difficult time gathering the required signatures she needed to put her name on the party’s ballot? As it turns out FONKAR got an OLONKA(R) of GARI and tried to pass it to Ghanaians as a shipload of premier quality rice. Pure Baloney! Shame! Shame! Shame!

Before the Sunyani congress, Ex-President Rawlings was NDC God, his wife a party matriarch on a heavenly pedestal. Did her resounding trouncing at the party’s 2012 presidential candidate poll change anything? Is the NDC and indeed political parties in Ghana finally evolving from personality cults that worship a few individual leaders into reputable political parties with real nation building agenda?

Is Ghana's political arena finally free of the vindictive politics of personal insults and revenge – us against them? Will party symbols like the elephant, the umbrella, the mother hen etc. remain just symbols and not the reason why some of our electorate vote a certain way? Are conditions finally ripe for the pragmatists among us to join the political fray and help chart our nation's budding political course? Written and submitted by L. Kojo Yeboah, Raleigh NC, USA