NPP Needs to Counter.

Before I bite too deep into the meat of this article, it is important to make clear that most NPP leaders, supporters and sympathisers readily admit that the party’s 2008 election loss was essentially self-inflicted and was entirely avoidable. However, taking responsibility for an election does not mean that some key tools used by the opposition to contribute to their triumph should be overlooked. So, in this article, I am going to discuss one of the stratagems used by the NDC in the last election – professional lying, and, point out how the NPP should counter them, going forward.

As one NPP Activist aptly described it “what the opponent [NDC] did was put us [NPP] in [Sic] the defence by fabricating lies and painting us [NPP) evil. They used elitism, corruption, nepotism and others [other things] against us. This was done in all Ghanaian languages on the air waves. They made us look like wolves in sheep skin. They kept hammering at our faults. In effect, Ghanaians opted to vote for the only available alternate party at their disposal [the NDC]. So we learn from this experience”.

The four key words in the two paragraphs above are as follows: lying, fabricating, professional and hammering. You can put them together into one simple sentence as follows: professionally fabricating lies and hammering them away into reality. Therein lied the grand strategy of the NDC to wrestle power back from the NPP. The NDC realised that short of such a scheme, they would likely not beat the NPP because the NPP’s real achievements and human rights record, when put side by side with the NDC’s, will not be positive for the NDC. So, they set out to use lies to sour the voters against the NPP so that the idea of Change will be considered by the people, who were otherwise appreciative of the NPP’s economic stewardship. These lies were not as isolated as they will seem to the non-professional mind. They were fabricated, orchestrated and used by truly professional liars, who have no moral constraints whatsoever. The NPP, of course, aided and allowed the NDC to do so with ease, because they are still stuck in the Western, intellectual and noblesse oblige mindset of its traditional founders – Dr. Danquah, Busia, etceteras, with all due respect to those great statesmen. Politically, these intellectual giants and true national heroes were kids to Kwame Nkrumah’s communist tactics. It is past time that NPP’s followers shed some of its Westminster style/heritage and replace them with some more home-made street smart modus operandi.

At this point, I will give real examples of some of the fabricated lies. The NDC outrageously accused President Kufuor of stashing away $5 billion! They said the President’s home was furnished with millions of dollars of taxpayer money. They said the NPP was behind many spates of murder before the 2000 elections – killing people and then putting their bodies around strategic locations to make the then NDC government look evil (as if that is a hard thing to do without resorting to such extreme measures). They accused Nana Akufo-Addo of being a cocaine user. They accused the NPP of looting all the gold reserves left from the British Colonial government. They accused the NPP of being tribalistic while in government. They accused the NPP of killing the Dagomba King Yaa Naa Yakubu Andani. They also said the NPP was going to rig the elections; which will lead to mayhem in the country. Rawlings even accused President Kufuor of killing opponents, in front of a visiting US President Bush. The list is endless. Of course, almost all of these accusations are utter fabricated liars, with no evidence to back them up. Some of these have in fact been actually proven false. For instance, the Bank of Ghana gold reserves is in tact. The NDC likely tampered more with the votes in the last election than any other party did – in Akwatia, for instance. In fact, few believe the NDC would not have rigged a close election like we had in 2008, if they were in power.

One key point that I like to make is that the NDC’s brain trust is filled with Revolutionaries, Marxists, Communists and Socialists. A lot of them are thugs, coup makers, former CPP Young Pioneers, PNDC Cadres/CDRs, etceteras. They are specialists at fabricating and emphasizing lies and doing other dastardly acts in their quest for gaining and maintaining power. They are also pathological liars, who have no care about throwing stones while living in glass houses, as long as they have body armour with which they think they can escape injury. For instance, how often did you hear J.J. Rawlings sermonizing about probity and accountability? Meanwhile his government enshrined into the country’s sacred constitution complete immunity from prosecution for himself and his cronies, after their murder spree, siphoning off unimaginable state funds (go and check out Comrade E.T. Mensah’s house) and selling off almost every government asset to themselves or their cronies?

So, the NDC in their strict adherence to subterfuge, installed a humble looking Professor “Asomdwie hene” Mills to lead the party while running a ruthlessly negative campaign of lies aimed at the NPP. These NDC folks are true tactical heirs to Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro, Qaddafi, etc. To refresh or educate, as one of my colleagues recently said “one of the first things Nkrumah did upon the formation of the CPP was to create a paramilitary outfit - The ACTION TROOPERS - out of the hooligans in the cities and towns and the jobless World War II veterans”. The TROOPERS “would do the maiming and killing, while Nkrumah would be talking about national unity and the need for peace in the country”. “Left to the Busias and Joe Appiahs, the CPP would have murdered all its opponents and still manage to get Ghanaians to blame them for originating political violence in the country!” And, I must add, that is exactly how Nkrumah played his politics, culminating in his bringing in the PDA. Small wonder, we see today, “Ga Youths” for instance springing up to harass President Kufuor, seemingly out of nowhere but with nary an admonishment from the “Asomdwie hene” President Mills? I bet you most people will still swear that President Mills is a nice and humble guy while President Kufuor, who actually was peaceful and accommodating to a fault, is seen as more divisive.

So, the NPP has to come to terms with the nature of the opponent they face in the NDC – more aptly described as the National Deception Congress. They are subscribers to communist tactics. They are professional liars, who strategically fabricate and churn out lies about their opponents. They do so incessantly and strategically. Unfortunately for the high minded NPP folks, human beings are very ironically interesting. They profess their high standards and mindedness but often fall for cheap poli-tricks. So, the NPP simply has to "fight fire with fire". The NPP cannot continue to play soft with rebutting and fighting the propaganda of the NDC. High mindedness typically fails in politics, even in developed countries. Enough of the noblesse oblige style of NPP politics. Perhaps there is something to be learned from the fact that the least educated of the NPP’s former leaders (President Kufuor) has been the most successful politician within that party so far. The NPP has to forcefully fight back with its own propaganda. I am not advocating that the NPP also set up blatant lying machinery. After all, the NDC is already pregnant with a lot of negative material for use by the NPP’s own propaganda machinery, if its want to build a strong one at that. For instance, the NDC sold more state assets through the Divestiture Implementation Program. So, why shouldn’t the NPP hit them hard for that instead of being put on the defensive by the NDC about a then proposed sale of Ghana Telecom?!

Ghana is in Africa and the NPP has to come to terms with the way things work in Africa . It cannot continue to adopt a Western approach to to an authentic African political situation like Ghana 's. For instance, if the CPP was telling voters that only their party's votes will be cast on Election Day while the UGCC's vote will be held the day after the elections, it was critical that the NPP’s ancestral party (the UGCC) rebut such trickery, forcefully, if it found out about it. But, more importantly, the UGCC should have anticipated such things and perhaps come up with its own clever ideas to counter them.

If the UGCC, PP, PFP/UNC had adapted to street smart politics, perhaps the NPP would have been bequeathed with cleverer ideas and strategists today and would not have been so out-maneuvred the way it did when the NDC was able to deny so many of the NPP’s monitors in the Volta region from going to monitor the votes in the 2nd round, for crucial periods of time. The NPP government probably should have had the army in before the monitors and not the other way around. As it turned out, the party’s monitors were shut out and votes were likely tampered with before the monitors were able to get in. This is even more pathetic considering that the NPP was actually in government and controlled the security command of the country. As things turned out, the NPP’s counter efforts were said to be too late and amateurish. And, do you know what the EC Chairman said after the 2008 elections? I listened intently to one of his final press conferences. He said that the NPP made some serious allegations about the conduct of the votes in the Volta region but he cannot do anything about them because they border on criminality and those can only be handled by the courts. He went on to declare a winner - the NDC's Prof. Mills, of course. Do you think any court will, after the fact of the declaration of the NDC win, overturn the election results, after it goes through a lengthy legal process and finds such accusations of the NPP to be true?

The NPP owes it to its descendents to smarten and toughen up to match its opponents’ well-honed poli-tricks so that its historical deficiency in the areas of political street smartness will be solved once and for all generations. The party has to quickly set up an effective War Room, not filled with professors but a team made up of smart folks from various walks of life. The NPP has to understand that politics is a craft, not one and the same as governing. You can have great ideas about say philosophy and economics but you have to win elections first before you can implement them. Winning elections, however, often requires more street smarts than book smarts. Enough of the NPP’s “we cannot behave like the other guys” stuff! Even in the US , the Democrats have finally had enough of the Republican's negative campaigns, which usually work unless robustly countered. The Republicans recently and successfully, for example, turned a real war hero in John Kerry (the 2004 Democrat candidate for President) into a weakling and traitor while making war dodgers George W. Bush and Dick Cheney look like Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf. Obama, the next Democrat nominee, however, countered them and went on to win the Presidential election. And, he even did his own so-called negative campaigning. But, he did it so smartly that many did not even know it when he was doing so. That is how NPP needs to think and be in order to counter the National Deception Congress.

As I recently wrote on Ghanaweb, the NPP needs to demand leaders with backbone and who show backbone. Leaders like Nana Akufo-Addo, for instance, need to be encouraged to be who they truly are instead of morphing into so-called humble guys, while the NDC is doing worse and cleaning the NPP’s socks. A real strategic WAR ROOM also needs to be built from the ground up to support the party leaders. The NPP needs to remember that politics has been often described as WAR fought without conventional weapons. A few generations ago, kingdoms were formed, maintained and expanded by force. The NPP needs to counter the NDC’s professional liars now and for as long as that party exists.

Source: Prince Ofosu Sefah.psefah@yahoo.ca. Toronto, Canada.