Of NDC Hollow Victory: Change for What?

By Justice Sarpong, Dallas, Texas, USA. sarpongjustice@ymail.com

If you were one of those who woke up in the morning of December, 8, 2008 with a pummeling head pangs, you were not alone, the nightmare was real, that we came to the precipice of a cataclysmic political reverse, is nerve wracking, and especially so, when measured against the hard work and heavy lifting the NPP has chalked under its belt.

If you could put your ears to the ground the unmistaken sound that came through was that some people had gone into the polling booth to register a protest vote, last December 7, 2008. If only it was that funny, you would dismiss such misguided votes, but my friend this is a defining moment in our political life, and for people to go into an election just to register a temporal protest vote, is to say the least, throwing the baby away with the dirty water, or killing the hen that lays the golden egg. This brings to mind the confusion and perplexity that confounded Kwame Nkrumah in his dark days in Guinea. Is the Ghanaian like the proverbial hen, which would wipe its beak clean, and deny having been well fed? We can only recall Nkrumah’s pain that he did not know Ghanaians only wanted milk, corned beef, and sugar, or else he would not have built the Akosombo Dam and Tema Harbour and rather spent the money on turning every tap in Ghana to pump milk and honey. Ditto, ditto, the huge unprecedented massive infrastructural network and economic foundations that the NPP and Kufour administration have achieved in the last 8 years.

My brother and sister, you have got to ask yourself, when you voted last December 7, 2008, did you really vote for, Continuity or Change, continuity being associated with the NPP and NDC with change. I am going to be blunt and I make no apologies, change for change sake is dumb, especially when measured against the record of the NDC. Going into the election, the hapless and visionless NDC offered the Ghanaian populace nothing meaningful new, except to portray itself as crass jerky party that borrowed heavily on Barack Obama’s populist catch phrases, and even supplanted their own vice-presidential candidate with that of Barack Obama. On policy issues, the NDC came close to plagiarizing the NPP manifesto, and came short on backing up their change mantra with real new and different policy positions. The NDC as we know it has evolved over the years from being firebrand pretentious socialist ideologues to no-plan, no-vision party today. Whichever way you look at it, they seem to be saying they are better students and copycats, lacking woefully in originality. They remind you of the perpetual student, never blooming into full graduation. So I ask you, why change the horse in the middle of the stream when the NPP has been the real agent of change in our political and economic lives since the return to constitutional rule, at the end of a long slump, under the auspices of the same party apparatus called P\NDC?

Today the NDC wants to crown themselves as the power brokers in our political lives so let's congratulate them for their hollow victory. They don't even control Parliament with their 113 members of Parliament and might not even end up with the speaker of parliament but let's allow them their day in the sun. Ghanaians are at the crossroads and posterity will not judge us well if we change course at this crucial moment of our country's development. The hypocrisy of Rawlings and NDC kamikaze election year rhetoric on the economic and the social situation in Ghana is despicable. The fact is that, poverty has been reduced from 52% to 28% since 2000 when NPP came to power, and this is the truth, but NDC is intentionally peddling falsehood about poverty level in Ghana to achieve their political objective.

Since the first round of the 2008 election results, the NDC has been very active and mellow about their positions, but in politics as in church, there is no telling when penitence is sincere and the NDC’s solipsist history tells me the they are smelling blood of victory and does not want to rock the boat now and if by legerdemain they can flummox Ghanaians to elect proxy Mills, then we will see Rawlings of P\NDC days ruling Ghana by fiats through their 113 NDC Parliamentarians, rubber stamping edits and fatwas from, you know who, Asomasi.

Ghanaians cannot afford to turn the country clock back, because the NDC has nothing new to offer. Ghanaians should let their morals be their secret Police and vote wisely instead of being hoodwinked by old tribal passions. Now that the NPP members are witnessing what awaits them in case of Proxy Mills presidency, maybe they will go to the polls. I've talked to some people in Kumasi and Accra and they seemed to have regretted not voting and plan to do their part and get their friends and neighbors to the polls on December 28th to show the voting juggernaut that sat out the first round.

Dr Bawumia should be dispatched to the Upper West and East regions with Mr. Dery, the regional Minister of Upper West to shore up the votes there. President Kufour approval rating is 70%, let him campaign more for Nana in these regions, Ashanti, Eastern, Brong Ahafo and Greater Accra. We also have to advertise on TV showing the NDC brutalities. Film or re-enact Rawlings brutalities with his P\NDC days and show it on TV for those who were not born and those who seem to have lost their memories. Do a lot of radio advertisement about P\NDC brutalities and how Atta Mills is being used by the NDC mafia to get back to the seat of government. Now that Rawlings has hijacked the Mills campaign, let's tell his history to the electorate.

NPP should do their rallies but get your volunteers to canvass for votes at the markets, transport stations and get the NPPians to go to the polls. So far the foot soldiers are doing that right now in our strongholds but don't let us forget the regions where our voters also failed to vote due to apathy and complacency. Let’s adopt the Obama mantra; our mammoth rallies did not amount to anything without the people voting. Let it be the mantra for NPP to drum it into the heads of their supporters to go and vote on 28th December.

Dispatch popular figures in NPP who are popular in their respective regions to set up permanent base in their regions and campaign continuously for the next two weeks. Obetsibi Lamptey and Oboshie Shai-Cofie in Accra with the backing of Nana Akuffo Addo and President Kufour will put Greater Accra back in NPP column in the second round and ensure Nana's annihilation of the NDC hollow victory.

NDC Parliamentary victory is hollow in the sense that, our representative government is not representative in the true meaning of democratic principles. How do you justify one representative for 180,000 people in Weija constituency in Accra but have 10,000 people also have one representative as it is in the Ketu South constituency in Volta region? Something is definitely wrong here, the way constituencies are carved out in Ghana is despicable to say the least. We can't have some constituencies in the metropolis of Accra, Ablekuma Central, South and North in Accra and Manhyia, Subin, Kwadaso, Bantama, Asawase, Suame and Old Tafo in Kumasi have 100,000 voters with one representative while smaller constituencies with less than 20,000 people have the same voice in Parliament.

How can Volta Region have 22 constituencies with about one third of voters as there are in Ashanti Region? If we divvy up constituencies according to population figures (which is the way it is done in every democratic country), then Ashanti Region should have 66 constituencies to reflect its population and not 39 constituencies, but if Ghanaians don't want to pay more Parliamentarians, then the numbers should reflect the inhabitants of each region and instead of increasing the number of constituencies, maybe we should reduce the inflated constituencies like 13 constituencies in Volta Region to be compatible with Ashanti region. I know I am going to catch flacks for this and accused of being tribal but this anomaly does not exist in just these two regions. The time has come to allocate the 230 seats in parliament in accordance with each region’s popular percentage in the general population.

The 27 constituencies in Accra are abominable. If we go by the registered voters in Greater Accra, it should have 37 constituencies and not 27. Can anybody justify why Greater Accra should have fewer constituencies than Eastern region with 29 constituencies, when Greater Accra has almost twice the population in Eastern region? The three Northern Regions have 49 constituencies in between them, (Northern 26, Upper East 13, and Upper West 10) but they have fewer voters than Ashanti region. In the December first round voting, less than 1.2 million voters cast votes in the three regions while there was I.6 million votes cast in Ashanti Region, more than 400,000 vote differential but those three regions have ten more constituencies than Ashanti region and that is not what a representative government calls for. When I raised this point earlier in a post last week, one of our resident Ghanaweb political gurus castigated me for not knowing how constituencies are created in Ghana and said we use districts to create constituencies. Ok, those are fine with me then create more districts in the populous constituencies or combine some districts in the densely populated constituencies to make our democracy more representative.

How can Greater Accra, with population more than twice of Western region have 27 constituencies while Western is blessed with 22 constituencies? Does it make any sense? NDC is celebrating their Parliamentary supremacy but I call it hollow because even with 113 as compared to NPP 109, NPP parliamentarians put together had more votes than NDC 113 parliamentarians because of regions like Central, Volta, Upper East and West regions, the four most less populated regions in Ghana with about four million people total out of 24 million people, which is about 17% of total population but have 64 Constituencies out of the 230 total, and that is 27.5% of the parliamentary seats, so tell me how fair this is. We need to go back to the drawing board and redraw our constituencies.