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The NDC has won, now what next?
E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Ghanadot
Results of the final Ghana presidential election
from Tain are in and Atta Mills, the NDC candidate, has been
declared the president elect of the Republic of Ghana by the
Electoral Commissioner, Dr, Afari Djan. Farewell to the old
president. So long live the new one, we should easily say.
But it is not going to be easy.
On January 7, 2009,
President Kufuor will proceed to retirement. He said he was
ready and he looked very relaxed saying so to the public on
January 2, 2009; at a time when hell was breaking loose with the
2008 election impasse.
Kufuor would go out very
content, believing that he had done his best. He had won the
world’s acclaim many times over. In his mind, he had set Ghana
on a stage ready for take off.
But would the NDC, the party
that won the 2008 elections and its leadership agree? This was
the man whose party they had worked so hard to defeat. He was
also the man they had told the world they thought little of.
The NDC went to the
elections not a bit impressed by Kufuor’s achievements. They
accused him of many things. They even said he was corrupt and
ineffective. They have the chance now to prove the charge. The
world will be waiting.
The NDC must be commended
for having waged a very effective campaign. The outcome has
been brilliant. Throughout the campaign, they managed to keep
the NPP on the defensive with a strategy that we should call the
“detonator” approach.
Right from the start of the
2008 campaign, the NDC implemented the “detonator” approach.
Without a shred of evidence, they announced to the world that
the NPP would steal the 2008 elections. When things got a
little rough down the line, they began calling for power
sharing; bringing into the campaign images of the chaos from the
Kenya and Zimbabwe elections of the same year.
With these moves, the NDC
forced the world to pay closer attention to Ghana and for the
NPP administration to be cautious and ethical about their
elections’ conduct. By the December 7, 2008, they had achieved
one aim – at least that of power sharing. They had control of
parliament.
The “detonator” strategy had
a principal exponent in the person of ex-President J. J.
Rawlings. As an active member of the NDC campaign, he was
marvelous - his presence, always a ghost of coups past. In
essence, he was an enigma and a veiled threat at the same time.
The question on many minds was if victory did not go to the NDC
would he do it again?
As the principal initiator
of many coups, Rawlings knew the effect of violence on the
Ghanaian mind. And the Ghanaian public in turn needed no
further reminder of the possibilities or consequences of the
wrong electoral move when Rawlings mounted the political
platform.
So, having been softened in
the past by several coups, the Ghanaian public by this date had
become malleable to the threat of violence. Many wanted so
much to avoid memories of past coups in Ghana – that plus
images of the violence from Kenya and Zimbabwe that they had
seen on television. The specter had made them ready to
vote for the NDC if only to keep things quiet.
For the public described
above, the “detonator” approach was a tailor made strategy.
Rawlings had sensed that –
the feelings that he was feared. He did not keep things quiet
and did not mince his words on the campaign trail as he
constantly sought to bring to the attention of the public to
what he called crimes of the NPP. And with his utterances, he
was able to stir up passions within the NDC party.
Rawlings acted like a fist
in a glove. You know the punch was there, ready. When it would
land would depend on your move. You had only one option and
that was to move according to the wishes of the hand in the
glove. That was the potential “detonator” message. Even the
Ghanaian security agencies understood it.
And as Rawlings had probably
surmised, there was nothing the security agencies could do about
a potential. A gun at rest is a potential killer, but it hasn’t
been fired. You cannot arrest the owner.
The NDC, from start to
finish, strategically controlled the campaign with the
“detonator” approach. They left the NPP several times reeling
and confused in the campaign. They did it a lot of times with
alarmist charges. You may question the NDC’s tactics on many
levels, especially on that of the ethical, but not on the level
of “real politick.” At that level, the NDC was at its finest.
The NDC, for instance,
didn’t care to explain how the charge of vote stealing could be
accomplished by the NPP. They didn’t even bother to remember
that there had been one election already in 2004, under the NPP
administration, that was adjudged by the world to be fair and
proper. They just made the charge up this time and announced
the possibility as if it was an oracle.
Immediately after the
stealing charge was the push for power sharing. Faulty election
results in Kenya and Zimbabwe had made the notion and the topic
viable and the NDC was quick to seize the opportunity.
The idea that Ghana wasn’t
remotely Zimbabwe or Kenya didn’t matter to the construct of
power sharing reasoning for the NDC. The fact that the 2008
election was months away didn’t also matter. Putting the notion
as a campaign thought in the minds of some gullible souls in the
streets was a sure reminder of the trouble to follow should
things go awry for the NDC.
In essence, the gullible
soul in the street was the trigger for the “detonator” effect.
It worked.
The NDC power sharing aim
or objective was achieved by mid-course of the elections.
By the time it got to Tain, the rural community with 56,000
unaccounted, they had victory in the bag. But that was not
the sad part of the story.
Why the NPP leadership decided to make Tain
the last stand would remain an enigma for the course of the
entire political campaign history of our time. With 23,000
votes behind in the polls, somebody reasoned that they had a
chance with the 33,000 left (56,000 total) in a community that
happened to be the opposition's constituency!
Like it or not, the NDC
has won the presidency. There is now a de facto shift in
governance in Ghana.
Now what next? To
venture some unassailable truths the immediate recognition
should be that the campaigning is over. And that what
Kufuor has achieved during his term in office would be hard to
match and almost impossible to beat.
E.
Ablorh-Odjidja,Publsiher
www.ghanadot.com,
Washington, DCJanuary 3, 2009
Permission to publish: Please feel free to publish or
reproduce, with credits, unedited. If posted at a website,
email a copy of the web page to
publisher@ghanadot.com . Or
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