Today in History: Mahama can’t win power in 2020 – Bagbin

Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin in the lead up to the selection of a presidential candidate for the National Democratic Congress for the 2020 election, warned his party against settling on former President John Dramani Mahama.

According to Mr Bagbin who was among six others contesting John Mahama for the NDC flagbearership, a choice of the former president meant that the party was bound for defeat in the Presidential election of 2020.

Read the full article as first published by awakenewsonline.com on February 2, 2019, below:

John Mahama will lead the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to another embarrassing electoral defeat in 2020, if party delegates vote for him as flag-bearer, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin has predicted.

John Dramani Mahama and Alban Bagbin, together with five others, are in the race for who will lead the NDC in the 2020 presidential election, and to the latter, the deceptive Mahama fever witnessed in 2016 is playing back, and based on this, he said the NDC is speeding into the ditch.

“What did we not see in 2016, wherever Mahama went to campaign? The electorate poured out to clamour for him as others poured thousands of praises on him. The man they so much praised, eventually, handed us a bitter defeat ever since 1992,” the Nadowli-Kaleo Member of Parliament (MP) expressed on Accra FM’s night political show hosted by Kwabena Bobbie Ansah.

The danger the NDC has failed to realise is its determination to build the party around John Mahama who is seen as a ‘demi-god’ by some of these party faithful, Mr Bagbin observed.

“He has become a demi-god in the party and so even when he goes wrong and you point it out, you will get his supporters verbally attack you. The NDC is not John Mahama is, and the way some of them are going, I am sad we will be beaten again by the NPP in 2020, with him (John Mahama) as our presidential candidate,”the current Ghana’s Parliament ‘Mugabe’ foretold.

He said the careless abandon of the grassroots that developed apathy in 2016 is being played back by one of the contenders.

The grassroots, he explained, are the backbones of the party, therefore, if a candidate continued to have funfair on his tours where, when regional and constituency executives came to meet him, in the company of a few fine faces, and his supporters drew a conclusion that their candidate had the overwhelming endorsement of the delegates, then the numbers would disappoint them on February 23, when the NDC goes to the polls.

“Some of the NDC’s supporters’ behaviour is worrisome, as if an individual, instead of a party, wins elections. Politics is not theory; it is practice and I have records to show for my successes since I went to Parliament in 1992.

“Former President Mahama had his chance to perform and so he could be assessed, but, I want to state that I have not failed before. My constituents can attest to that,” Mr Bagbin teased Mahama.

When asked what new leadership quality he possesses to woo the party delegates to give him their mandate, Alban Bagbin said: “Considering my enormous records in my constituency and parliament, I bring expansive, participatory and inclusive governance.

“I will organize the NDC better with systems to generate ideas when in government.”

Additionally, he said his leadership would anchor for fair, free and form society should he become the president of Ghana.

Concluding, he said: “I propelled John Mahama to become president. I don’t hate him. We are both in a contest to build the NDC but not an individual.”