Opinions of Saturday, 23 April 2011

Columnist: Amenga-Etego, SaCut

Mills: heart of a coward, spirit of a sycophant!

Dear President Mills,

Warm regards and season’s greetings to you from one of your courageous party
youth who have followed your reign and written several letters to your
Excellency, expressing my most sincere views and opinions regarding the current
state of affairs in the NDC party and government. I have been chastised in the
past by your blind loyalists and supporters who accuse me of insolence in my
open letter communications with the President of the land. I’m sure they’re
confusing my plain courageous talk with insolence. Nonetheless, I have taken
notice of that, and therefore will choose my words carefully, albeit succinctly.

But let it be on record; I’m not anti- Atta Mills as people have conveniently
been peddling around. I have simply been against many of your decisions,
actions/or inactions, choices and utterances based on the principles that I know
should guide you as president from the NDC party. I believe in giving people the
chance to try. I have voted for Prof Mills since 2004 and I will vote for you
again if in the unlikely event that NDC delegates genuinely decide on July 8
that you should continue to lead the NDC to 2012 general election because, then,
my loyalty to the NDC will leave me with no choice. But I’m working against that
happening because I believe you have tried your very best but your effort is not
enough and your aptitude on the job has been appalling- to say the least. Your
mandate cannot be renewed by any prudent people- unless we want disastrous
results in the 2012 general election. The NDC party can offer better leadership
to Ghanaians than that which we get from you President Mills right now.

Mr. President, the last time I wrote to you was mainly to lament your
impregnable resolve to ignore wise counsel and unarguably rich experience from
the NDC founder and former Ghanaian President Jerry John Rawlings- the man who
gave your greatest opportunity to political office. I also decried the last
time obvious instances of your attempt to shift away – insensitively- from the
very fundamental ideals, values, principles or moral virtues that form the
bedrock of the NDC of which you lead incompetently right now.

I particularly challenged your Excellency to openly demonstrate your loyalty and
conviction to the NDC ideals. I even suggested to the chagrin of your blind
supporters and avowed loyalists that your NDC ID card is taken away from you by
the party’s secretariat for treating the NDC ideals with disdain. I still stand
by this today because the situation has only gotten worse. Only this time, I’m
asking the NDC delegates to reject your bid to perpetuate your reign of
ineptitude.

Mr. President, it is also obvious that you’re exploiting religion- or
Christianity- as ‘opium of the masses’ to create the false impression in the
minds of Ghanaians that you’re a good man, and the rest of us who are making
different suggestions including the NDC founder are bad people. I’m not sure
what moral code that guides your leadership decisions which encourages you to
shake hands with the murderers in our society? I don’t know which moral code
guides you to sit down with the plunderers of our national resources? I don’t
know Mr. President what moral code guides you to hang your opponent’s or enemy’s
picture on your wall and regard him as your hero? What moral code encourages you
to abandon your original context, even denying the sacrifices of your
benefactors prior to your assumption of office as president? What morale code
teaches you to refuse to keep your word to the people whose benevolence put you
in office, and yet, expecting unconditional following? What I know is what an
Italian political philosopher said that ‘those who enter politics must be
prepared to leave their scruples at the door’.

Yes, by all means, let God help you fight. And yes, let God be your guide for
ultimate goodness. But like King David in the Bible who went to fight Goliath
the Philistine giant with ‘guidance from God’, he still went to battle with a
sling and a stone- even a knife so he could cut off the head after killing
Goliath- just in case. That was King David’s idea. Not God’s. Yet God was with
him. President Mills where are your ‘own arms’ to succeed as president apart
from God’s guidance? I don’t believe you have any, and that’s why you should be
giving way now for a new leader of the NDC.

I want to ask you Mr. President; have you ever had your Chief murdered in broad
day light before your very own eyes? Or your brother brutally murdered in
military detention for exercising his right of political association and without
any justice? Have you ever been sacked from your job, and your wife and children
unable to feed, and are destitute for a bed to sleep all because you believed
and espoused the ideals and principles of the National Democratic Congress or
because you don’t belong to the New Patriotic Party? Have you ever gone homeless
from not paying your rent because you worked for GHANA AIRWAYS which got run
down and liquidated by public/NPP government officials based purely on avarice
and who shared the state assets and set up their own private caricature called
GHANA INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES? If you have not Mr. President, then you are not a
judge of those who have- the people you have denied. But if you have, and yet,
you still shake hands with these murderers and plunderers, saboteurs and pure
criminals then Mr. President you don’t deserve your title- in my books. And any
leaders who do this obviously have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a
sycophant. That answers why Mr. President, you only listen to those who sing
your praises and you disregard- with disdain- some of us who refuse to flatter
you since it is neither in our nature nor nurture to do so.

I hope you are not surprised at the level of internal resistance to your reign
of exclusionism, unfaithfulness, ingratitude, vindictiveness, disloyalty or
rather obscene loyalty, betrayal and usurpation, lack of courage to do what is
prudent? I sincerely hope you couldn’t be naïve to assume that after all this
betrayal; the people will remain unquestionably loyal? You choose to align
yourself with the few nobles around you- preferring to please them and prove
your ‘manliness’ and independence.



The power came to you from the people and you can’t resist it when they’re
forced by your actions to desert you. Not even your orchestrated farcical
nationwide endorsements from a few ‘squealers’ in your team can sway the power
of the people. This resistance is coming in the form of a whirlwind in a storm.
And it is led by the youth with a consecrated determination to restore
integrity, loyalty and unity. We also intend to make history in the process.
Between and above all, this resistance, unprecedented as it may be, should lead
to the restoration of the TRUE NDC VALUES without compromise- those that you
have conveniently buried since you became president.

What sort of people have you surrounded yourself with Mr. President? Are these
the finest people you can fine to help you achieve your goals? Or these are the
loudest praise singers? How can these people say in opposition that they want to
change the ‘revolutionary vocabulary’ of the NDC through the ‘new NDC’ where
words like ‘CADRES’ were replaced in our manifesto language with ‘FOOT SOLDIERS’
(one who fights principally on foot, not a vehicle) and today in power; these
same people including the Vice President John Mahama, National chairman Dr.
Kwabena Adjei, Nii Lantey Vanderpure, James Agyenim Boateng and many others have
publicly posited that the people called FOOT SOLDIERS don’t exist and that it is
completely alien to the NDC. They now say that the mass followers of the party
are known as CADRES and not FOOT SOLDIERS. They want to wish away the people who
gave you power by changing their name. They’re so idle they now even play with
words. Convenient! What sort of CADRES who disassociate themselves with June4
anniversary Or 31 DEC. movement anniversary commemoration? Then which revolution
are you defending? Is this the so-called ‘new NDC’ who think that sitting in
vehicles with president Mills and moving around the country make them the
greatest contributors to the NDC 2008 victory and therefore deserve the most
privileges and courtesies under this administration- greater than those who made
it on FOOT, organized on the ground, walked from house to house and bringing the
crowds to listen to the message and faced all the hostilities of the opponent,
and kept the vigil at every polling station around the nation on election night
to ensure the sanctity of the ballot. How much more naïve can your team become?
Please tell Koku Anyidoho to redirect his mis-communications from the castle.

The bid of NANA KONADU AGYEMAN-RAWLINGS is a necessary and natural response to
the resistance being put up at the grass roots against your establishment.
Someone must rise to the occasion- and timely too. And I believe the woman can
do it, which is what we all want- someone who can do it. The resistance is not
coming from the AIRWAVES. And that is why is it not only futile, but a waste of
everybody’s time to try to quell the people’s resistance from the AIRWAVES
and/or mass media with these farcical endorsements. In my books, these panic
reactions from day one when the signs began to appear on the walls of an eminent
challenge to the NDC leadership only exposes President Mills as an effeminate
leader who definitely does not inspire, and is not admired by the mass followers
of the NDC including myself. This gives more credence to the need to change
leadership in our party, to go for a stronger, more courageous personality we
can trust.

Mr. President, There are those few who flatter you and will continue to do so.
They have been flattering you all along in order not to lose their crumbs. What
you needed to do was to listen to the unflattering voices within the party- the
true voices that gave and can take away the power from you. But your own nature
and your flatterers have succeeded in disallowing you from remembering this
important TRUTH. And now Mr. President, you have to find the words in the
spirit of TRUE DEMOCRACY to convince the delegates of the NDC on why you should
not be rejected and ostracized by the party for giving us a cowardly heart and a
sycophantic spirit for leadership. And please Mr. President, you cannot find
refuge in ‘MONEYCRACY’ because the soul of the NDC is not for sale.

Courageously yours,

SaCut Amemnga-Etego (YFL General Secretary and NDC Youth activist)
020-726 7072
Yfl_ghana@yahoo.com