E T Mensah, Sherry Aryeetey & Lion Desert Rawlings

By Sedi Bansah

Ex-President Jerry John Rawlings will have to reconsider his decision to pitch his wife, Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, against President John Evan Atta Mills for the flagbearer race of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) as he is painfully losing his closest friends who have stood by him through thick and thin for many years.

Amongst those who have publicly deserted Mr. Rawlings, so far, are Mr. Enoch Teye Mensah, Minister for Employment and Social Welfare, Nii Laryea Afotey-Agbo, Minister in the Office of the President and Ms. Sherry Ayittey, a life-long friend of the Rawlingses. The three personalities and the Rawlingses were inseparable.

Significantly, those yet to publicly declare whether they are with the Rawlingses or not are Deputy Minister for Finance and Economic Planning, Mr. Fiifi Kwetey; Deputy Minister of Works and Housing; Dr. Hanna Bissiw and her boss Alban S. Bagbin; Tony Aidoo, Head of Policy Implementation at the Presidency and Brigadier-General Nunoo Mensah, Security Advisor to the President.

Reports within the NDC circles are that these personalities were given appointment by President Mills to appease the ‘insatiable’ Mr. Rawlings, and they are naturally expected to root for Nana Konadu in her bid to become president of Ghana on the ticket of the NDC.

What makes the case of Mr. E.T Mensah quite remarkable is that he is not known to publicly disagreeing with the Rawlingses. He and the former first couple have been closely knit in everything, especially politics. In fact, until recently when Mr. E.T Mensah denied it publicly, it had even been rumoured that though he is not a professional barber, the relationship between him and Rawlings was so close that he could cut the ex-president’s hair, thus earning the name “Rawlings’ barber”.

But last Thursday when the Greater -Accra NDC regional executives convened a meeting to declare their support for the incumbent President, Prof. Mills, to contest the upcoming 2012 presidential elections, Mr. Mensah, who doubles as the Member of Parliament for Prampram, shockingly, was the person who moved the motion in support of President Mills’s bid.

Also present was Miss Sherry Ayittey, Minister for Environment, Science and Technology, to give her support to President Mills to contest the 2012 presidential elections on the ticket of the NDC, leaving her bossom friend and sister, Nana Konadu, in the cold.

Sherry is undoubtedly a very close pal of the Rawlingses, especially Nana Konadu, to whom she had been the second-in-command in running the 31 December Women’s Movement (DWM) established close to three decades ago. She was on her way to jail with Mrs. Rawlings, in the Caredem case.

The MP for Kpong-Katamaso, Mr. Afotey-Agbo, like Peter did to Jesus Christ when he denied him three times before the cock crew, according to the Great Book of Mathew, would draw blood for Mr. Rawlings and his family. The fearless-not-too-educated-but-polished-Minister was given lots of commando training during the Rawlings’ regime, and with this special military training, he has many times acted as the ex-president’s bodyguard.

Meanwhile, NDC big shots are increasingly getting surprised at the sudden positive publicity that the Rawlingses are enjoying in the Accra-based Daily Guide Newspaper, a paper known for Rawlings-bashing and negative stories on the NDC.

“They are helping him to torch his own house,” was how one prominent member of the NDC put it.

Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings’ bid to contest the NDC 2012 flagbearership position has sparked a wave of support for President Mills. So far, the executive members of the NDC in all the ten regions have declared their support for him.

But Nana Konadu has played down the wave of declarations and public support for President Mills ahead of the party’s delegates conference in July to elect a flagbearer.

Mrs. Rawlings last Wednesday resigned her position as a First National Vice Chairperson of the ruling party to enable her to contest the president when nominations open next month.

Ahead of the nominations, however, nationwide declarations and showers of praises have poured in from regional and constituency executives of the party for President Mills.

The Ashanti Region executives opened the floodgates of public declarations of support, and since then, their colleagues from the Western, Brong Ahafo, Volta, Central, Upper East, Upper West and Eastern Regions, have followed suit, albeit with some amount of rebellion from some executives who owe allegiance to the ex-first family.

On an Accra-based radio station last week, the former First Lady insisted that she was unfazed by the declarations, more so when some of the executives had been coerced to declare support.

She said her decision to declare her intention to contest the election was timely, given the wave of coerced acclamations by the executives.

“The issue of people in the regions saying that they throw their support behind another candidate or the other and then the same people call me to tell me how they have been coerced into taking certain decisions… I said let me resign from my executive position now so that I get the opportunity to talk to all my supporters who are calling me everyday asking me whether I am going to do, whether I am not going to do it,” she explained.

She was not worried about the seeming head-start the declarations of support would give President Mills in the race.

“I am not worried because I know what is happening. I have been in this game long enough to know whether we are playing chess or draft,” she touted.

She dismissed assertions that she had always nurtured the ambition to become the president of Ghana, saying that that “assertion is totally out of line and not true.”