Sack Rawlings and Obed from NDC

Poor Prof. John Evans Atta Mills! His selection as a running mate to the then president, Jerry John Rawlings in the 1996 presidential elections was a surprise. He worked hard and became the flagbearer of the then ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the 2000 presidential elections.

He lost and for the 2004 elections, the NDC has elected him to face incumbent, president John Agyekum Kufuor for a ?rematch?.

?Now Prof. Mills does not only have the problem of leading the NDC, as an opposition party to next year?s elections but he has the unenviable task of doing what has so far been elusive ? bridging the widening gap between the NDC?s Founder, ex-president Rawlings and its chairman, Dr. Obed Yao Asamoah,? the Daily Dispatch, a private news paper reports.

Some levelheaded supporters have suggested a number of measures, including the fact that both the Founder and Chairman of the party should be sacked from the NDC.

?Daily Dispatch interviews with some members of the NDC over the past two weeks have painted a picture of ?cancerous? disillusionment and apathy creeping through all levels of the party. The members we spoke to are from the pro-Rawlings and pro-Obed Asamoah camps, whilst others are independent or non-aligned. They all agreed that the NDC is bigger than either Rawlings or Asamoah.?

According to leading members of the NDC in Parliament, ?the problems within the NDC started before the 2000 presidential/parliamentary elections. There were various reports that the then president Rawlings had influenced Prof. Mills not to select Dr. Asamoah as his running mate for the 2000 elections. This is a story I don?t have facts to support but given Rawlings? open hatred for Obed?s candidature for the chairmanship, I?m inclined to believe certain aspects of it.

Rawlings actually deepened tensions between him and Obed when word went out that he had threatened to leave the NDC if Obed was elected as chairman. Many of us voted for Obed, not because we like him, he?s arrogant, but because we wanted to call Rawlings? bluff of leaving the party. Obed won and Rawlings ate back his words. We also felt that Obed would be a better chairman and run the party in a more organised manner.?

?The election of the party?s flagbearer continued along the same lines ? Rawlings supporting Mills and Obed supporting Dr. Kwesi Botchwey. Some of us to not believe that the tensions between Mills/Botchwey was worse than that of Kufuor/Nana Akufo-Addo in the run-up to the NPP?s 1998 Congress to select their 2000 flagbearer. Yet, the NPP did not go through such potential break-up scenarios. It is possible that the NDC is having such problems because we did not go through the full process of party formation, having been formed out of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) government.

The way and manner leading members of the Botchwey campaign team were manhandled at the congress was very worrying. As we speak, the continuing harassment of Botchwey?s supporters, including MPs is potentially divisive.?

The MP then justified his call for Rawlings and Obed to be sacked; ?Obed may not be that popular as a person but he represents a growing trend that the NDC is bigger than one person, Rawlings, even though the other political parties have avoided the problems of not having living founders. Obed may decide to resign today but it does not mean that the views of that growing trend will automatically disappear.

In the same vein, Rawlings leaving the party would not make the views of his supporters that he is more supreme than the NDC, vanish. Some of us sincerely believe that if these two personalities leave the party, their followers can somehow reconcile and support Prof. Mills with all their might and heart.?