Politics of Tuesday, 1 September 2009

Source: The Sun

JJ Moves To Seize NDC

Preparing Feverishly To Set Up Office At Party Headquarters

NDC Party founder and former President J.J. Rawlings is to play the supervisory foreman, who oversees all segments of the work dutifully to ensure that pretty everything is put in the proper setting, which is why pretty soon he will pitch camp at the Party's suburban Kokomlemle headquarters in Accra.

What is said to be shrill cries from complaining Party foot soldiers has massed up to his Excellency's notice at Accra's Ridge, where a queue of the gnashing Party faithful converge often to pour out grievances, in the eight-month rein of the new government.

Muffled views doing the rounds tell of the suspicion that the former President wants to seize the Party from slipping into the hands of the moderates, who hardly desire to walk his talk. But the centre-right administrators at the helm at the present time appear to nurse the perception that, a stay of the middle course may in the end rope in even more converts for after all, politics anywhere in the world is about numbers.

All the same issues do not appear to sit well with the emotional Mr. Rawlings, who has had to beat a retreat into his days of old in 1979 and the PNDC era, singing the populist tunes of a supposed suffering masses on a high falsetto note.

According to skin-on-head lads at the heart of the former President's push, one of the essences of the move is to ensure that the Party faithful who soldiered to return it to power is not sidelined and abandoned. Yet again, the move is to keep the Party (which gave birth to the government) on its toes so as not to depart from focused plans.

But in recent times there appears to be two major contrasting positions within the ruling Party, that could probably not augur well for cohesion and unity of purpose. Only last week, while Vice-president John Mahama advised the rank and file against seizure of toilets and other unruly behaviour, the former President was fanning the flames for a total takeover, once the interests of the downtrodden are trampled upon.

In addition to that, the ex-President has had occasion to tag the sitting President, JEA Mills TOO SLOW and it is thought that should he pitch camp at the Party Headquarters, he could fuel some unpalatable skirmishes with his often frank and no-holes-barred analysis of issues.

That, according to political scientists, could put fuel in the tanks of the anti-NDC battalion who could be ready to sink their teeth into the carcass of any negative topical issue that coul