On December the 7th, the good people of this nation spoke through their mandate. And I believe for now most of us even if in dilemma must have known who the peoples and definitely God’s choice is.
But unfortunately it appears that most of us especially those of us of the New Patriotic party were taken by a tsunami than a surprise. If a close ally of God should have even descended from heaven to tell us that the elections was not going our favor, we wouldn’t have hesitated to give him the red card as we gave the late Prof John Evans Atta Mills on his last visit to parliament before his demise. Why? The streams of opinion polls prior to the elections if not all, majority went our favor. Even all the visions from the quarters of most men of God went our favor. But the burning question is, why did the elephant still remained in the bush? It obvious, we caused our own downfall.
Did we have any other policy apart from the much touted “free S.H.S education policy’’? Any time we mounted the political platform; we started and ended our message with free education. We held on to this laudable but unfortunate policy as if we have nothing else to sell to the discerning Ghanaian electorate.
Our communicators become tools of mass distraction than construction. They were foul mouthed. Some top hierarchies of the party under the cloak of “member of communication team” did nothing but only spewed insults on the airwaves. It did us no good but only putted our self acclaimed intellectualism into question. This did not even allure our core supporters, how much more the floating voters who have more or less become deciders of who wins an election.
We attempted but on several occasions but failed to defend our inactions. How on earth could we have attempted to defend our “all die be die” mantra. Long after this rather unfortunate declaration, I thought we should have been bold enough to ask the Ghanaian for forgiveness or rather let sleeping dogs lie. But instead what did we do? Whenever we had the opportunity, we incorrigibly re-echoed a rather instigating phenomenon.
At my home whenever my father tries to go a little bit off-board, my mom do not hesitate at all to calm him down. But the mothers in our party failed to play this equally important role. More than often, I expected women like Ursula Owusu and Frances Asiam to calm down the likes of Hon. Kennedy Agyapong, Anthony Kabu, Sammy Awuku, Kojo Owusu Afrayie and the rest down when they let their passions go before them but it seems they rather needed help than I had thought. Others from the other side of the political divide might have been doing it but we forgot to remind ourselves that “two wrongs do no right” and it really served us right.
It again appears to me that our flag bearer seems to have a lot of “cats in his bag”. Whether they were anything to go by or not, I thought we could have brushed these mere unsubstantiated allegations away through the avalanche of press conferences we held to rather counter unproductive allegations from our opponents. Let me give you one example of the unproductive counter attack we made. The argument that the Vice President H.E Paa Kwesi Amissah Arthur lied to have did his MSc in economics on scholarship at the University of Ghana because there were allegations from the other quarters demanding to know why our Presidential candidate exempted Oxford University from his curriculum vitae was unnecessary. In the long run the veep went for his certificate hence proving us wrong with allegations. but were we able to provide any evidence of our candidate attending oxford or not? Your guess is definitely as good as mine. Was our flag bearer in anyway an arrogant fellow? His accusers seem to have all along been telling us that “actions speak louder than words”.
We failed to admit and accept the realities as they were. Sincerely speaking during the tenure of the Mills-Mahama led administration, the nation Ghana witnessed some major developments across board. But anytime we had the opportunity to address the nation, we failed to admit the fact and move on. We sounded as if, ever since President Kuffour left the reins of government, the nation Ghana has be static and had not moved forward. A phenomenon majority of Ghanaians who seem to have benefitted directly or indirectly from totally disagreed with us on.
But since we have not really come to ourselves to admit where we went wrong, it seems our leaders know something I do not know. Therefore, we could only hope they come out with the needed evidence to buttress what has become “our claim of vote rigging”. But in the absence of this, I can only recommend but one thing, let’s get back to the drawing board, employ the numerous available face salvaging tactics for 2016 since it clear the fate elections 2012 has retired us to.
