NDC or NPP, Ghana will soon decide

Obviously, the parties are gearing up for election 2016. And all are patiently waiting to see the mouth watery promises they will be making to the Ghanaian electorates come next year. The National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) will again go back to the electorates seeking for their votes again to manage Ghana for the next four years.

For the ruling NDC and President John Mahama, it is time for accountability. They have to tell Ghanaians what they did with the four-year mandate they were given in 2012. And I am sure I can predict what they will tell us.

As the President said in this year’s State of the Nation’s Address in Parliament, Kwame Nkrumah Circle is now a tourist site, and we all need to be happy. Yes, they have distributed free school uniforms to children in basic schools, and for those of us in Ashiaman, they have constructed the Ashiaman road. Hurray!

Those predictions I know will never be swept under the carpet when the president begins to talk about his achievements, because they are all he can account for during the four-year period of his presidency.

Maybe he will also tell us that he presided over a government that didn’t want to have anything to do with local industries, since just today we are reading in the dailies that textile was imported from China for the free school uniforms programme, after furniture was imported to furnish parliament, the new court building, and the job 600 offices, in the early part of the year.

Who cares if the government constructed 2 million roads, 3 billion schools, and whatever infrastructure they may talk about? All those project do not mean anything if the people who are to use it do not have means of survival. All that the million Ghanaian youth out there can talk about is whether they can earn a meaningful living years after leaving school.

Today, youth unemployment is on the rise in Ghana. Even those who have jobs cannot make a meaning out of their lives because their take-home at the end of the month is too little to survive them through the thirty days of a month.

The Government has refused to employ Ghanaian youths because they claim the country cannot pay new workers, hence a freeze on employment. Graduates who left school three years ago have remained unemployed for that reason. And the private sector has also refused to employ because the economic situation cannot allow them to. The current nature of the power sectors has since 2012 seen numerous employed men and women been laid off because companies have to spend more on their operations.

In June this year, the Ghana Employers Association indicated that about 12,000 jobs have been lost due to the power crises and further warned that more was to follow if the situation is not solved.

In the midst of all these countless problems and abysmal performance of the NDC government, when I hear people talk to me about achievements of the government, I wonder where they come from. Mass or Jupiter?

While the ruling NDC government is working hard to drain this country with their incompetence, the biggest opposition party, who could provide alternative government to the electorates of this country is busily fighting each other or looking for ways to get some people off their team ahead of a major election. In opposition, the NPP has been terribly managed to the extent that, they have not had at least a 6-month long peace in recent times.

Just when the "Adams Mahama" issue was dying off and the flag bearer has successfully completed his “raise and build tour”, another matter pops up between the National Executive committee (NEC) and the National Chairman on opposite sides.

Their intolerance for their fellow party members who they claim are not supporting the party into election 2016 is highly worrying. It is worrying because, those who are said to be working against the party’s prospects to a victory in 2016 are in the very minority.

If I am not mistake, they won’t even makeup 10% of the overwhelming majority who are focused on winning next year’s election. In respect of this, I want to know what happened to tolerating opposing views in a party which was formed on democratic principles. If they can’t tolerate these very minority people, how will they deal with opposition in government?

Today, one can hardly mention the NPP without associating it with violence. The headquarters of the NPP has now been a converted into venue where young people wielded cutlasses and other harmful weapons to fight their battle. Violence is gradually becoming the mantra of a party that does not have a history of revolution.

Instead of it ignoring the very few people who they claim are working against the success of Nana Addo’s presidency to appeal and convince Ghanaians to vote for Nana Addo, they are rather focusing their efforts on fighting their internally perceived enemies while ignoring the bigger work.

Nana Addo lost the last elections with close to 300,000 votes, and all they need to be doing now is identifying those votes to pull to their side. Rather, they are fighting the Electoral Commission (EC) for a new voter’s register which they clearly know won’t be compiled.

The National Youth Organiser of the NPP and those other members who have started calling for mayhem and raising the anger of their supporters against the EC must watch it. The fact that it is clear that their case will not see the light of day doesn’t mean Ghana should collapse because they want Nana Addo as president. They should not blame the EC for their laziness.

Electorates are patiently waiting to be convinced as to why they should vote for Nana Addo, and not a bad performing John Mahama and that is where their focus should be now, not the EC.

They must be made to understand that, if they refuse to fix these petty issues that they face every now and then and restore discipline, the Ghanaian voter would not find them worthy of their votes.

They must also make sure they put across a very convincing and realistic campaign message with a blue print to prove their achievability to win the hearts of floating voters else, they might not be able to add any vote to what they may get from the NPP supporters and sympathizers.

As the saying goes, “the devil you know is better than angel you do not know”. Its start work and the NPP must not keep sleeping the way they have been doing for the past 3 years.