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The news article only named him as a pollster, something Mr. Ben Ephson is widely known to do extremely poorly, and not as the editor-publisher of a newspaper (whose name I cannot readily recall but suspect is called the Daily Dispatch) which does not seem to be doing quite as well on the newsstand and the media websites as such robust and cutting-edge competitors as the Daily Guide and the New Crusading Guide.
His latest foray has been to play political analyst for the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC). And here, too, predictably, Mr. Ephson is doing equally badly.
According to the man who has been widely known to be on the payroll of the country’s largest opposition political party, the sure bet to a 2020 victory for the NDC, should former President John Dramani Mahama decide not to contest for the party’s presidential nomination, is for the NDC not to field any candidate with natal provenance or ancestry from any of the so-called Three-Northern-Regions – that is, the Northern Region Proper, Upper-East and Upper-West regions – and the Central Region.
And, oh, this polling scam-artist also believes that no indigenes or natives of the Western Region need apply, although there is no record of any presidential or vice-presidential candidate of the National Democratic Congress’ having been selected from the Western Region by party delegates.
And so I kept wondering whether Mr. Ephson was thinking about my good, old Uncle Tarkwa-Atta, that is, the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, who had actually been born at Tarkwa but hailed from Ekumfi-Otuam.
Recently, however, some media wags have been telling us that “President Ecominy” had, after all, not hailed from Ekumfi-Otuam at all, but that the latter township is only a settlement in which one of the remote ancestors of the former Legon tax-law professor had conjugally settled, but that, in fact, the members of the Mills Clan have always been known to be bona fide natives of the Oguaa/Cape Coast municipality, which has the enviable accolade of being the nation’s first colonial capital.
You see, what I love best about the key operatives of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress is their self-deceiving ostrich-like mindset or psychological orientation that makes them presume everything to have militated against their Election 2016 victory, except that which is actually the real reason for their massive defeat in last December’s poll.
The fact of the matter is that President Mahama lost the election not because he had been born in the Gonja (Read: Ganja) Traditional Area or district of the Northern Region, but primarily because the man who has been touted as a great communicator had eloquently exhibited gross administrative incompetence and a scandalous lack of vision and foresight for the development of the country.
I also don’t know why after 20 years of the deliberately calculated destruction of the country’s economy and industrial base by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, Mr. Ephson still appears to believe that any of the right-wing Trokosi nationalist leaders of the NDC has a presidential fighting chance.
Or maybe the faux NDC political analyst had Ms. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, the young woman doctor whose father, Chairman Rawlings, mischievously used his spooky influence to strong-arm the Wood Supreme Court into literally gifting his eldest daughter the Klottey-Korle parliamentary seat.
You see, short of the crude application of the politics of raw intimidation and Mafia-style terror, which the New Patriotic Party-affiliated Delta Force operatives appear to have skillfully and suavely inherited from the Mahama-minted Azorka Boys and gloriously chaperoned by Mr. Mark Woyongo, the former Minister of Defense and the Interior, I don’t see where NDC operatives have even a proverbial Chinaman’s chance of resuming their car-stealing syndicate at the Flagstaff House anytime soon.
And, by the way, I was also thinking about the Ahwoi Brothers’ team of political Galamsayers when Mr. Ephson noted that it would be suicidal for the political fortunes of the NDC for anybody from the Western Region to spoil for the 2020 presidential ticket of the Keta People’s Congress (KPC-NDC).
