Why Nana has to get mad to defeat NDC

By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong

With his vice president, Mahamudu Bawumia, selected and the ruling National Patriotic Party (NPP) set for the December general elections, what's most important is what Nana Akufo-Addo, the 2008 December NPP presidential candidate, need is get a bit mad and take on the increasingly growing opposition National Democratic Party (NDC) in order to win.

Quite simply, Nana needs to create a more compelling narrative on continuity from incumbent President John Kuffour’s record of progress and democratic growth, use history as a context for the development process and get mad about something the NDC either didn’t do or did it poorly, of which there are plenty. First and foremost, Nana must bring a narrative tohis position as a continuity agent and tie the progress-freedom agenda inthe context of Ghana’s 21 years of mindless military juntas and 6 years of imperially threatening one-party rule.

Nana can't simply seek continuity for continuity's sake. The argument must be made that this is an election with two choices: the continuity-seeking good folks of the NPP or the dictatorial, fearful-clinging bad guys of the NDC. The Nana campaign needs to brand every NDC negative attack as just another desperate attempt of the power-drunk NDC, as former President Jerry Rawlings and his cohorts show, to return to power at all cost.

Nana's campaign should argue that all of NPP history show that it has the courage to break from the same old game in order to provide the continuity Ghana needs for its progress, while the NDC refuse a new direction for Ghana, as Rawlings and his wife, Konadu-Agyemang, utterances show –threats, harassment, insults, muddled and violent thoughts, infantile behaviour, shallow-mindedness, lack of detailed projection of issues and their almost 20 years of rule that left Ghana darker as Ghana's sanitation, indiscipline and some aspects of its dark culture show. The NDC is increasingly undermining John Atta-Mills, its presidential candidate, by projecting its vice presidential candidate, John Mahama, over Atta-Mills.

It shows an incoherent NDC against the backdrop that Atta-Mills is easily manipulable in the face of a Rawlings family that are undemocratic and dictatorial. I don't really know why a law professor can be nationally known as intellectually weak in this context, but Nana and his NPP campaign team must continue to highlight the same old, same old NDC that offers: more of the same failed social accountability policy, more of the same being prone to violence in all its facets, more of the same misunderstanding of Ghana, more of the same unfreedom, more of the same muddled economic policies, more of the same military-mindedness, more of the same fractured education and healthcare sector without factoring in Ghana’s cultural values.

And Atta-Mills certainly offers more of the same failed Rawlings development policy without key sense of Ghana’s cultural values driving it. Nana can connect with voters on development issues by using history as a guideline – the issue about the record of development production over the years from Busia to Kufour.

Nana should start by reading Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw’s The Commanding Height, Hernando de Soto’s The Mysteryof Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else,and Amartya Sen’s Development As Freedom. The non-partisan and non-political inference of these writers in relation to the NPP is that under Kufour the NPP built a better economy, a more just, rule of law society and further opened up freedoms for progress in the face of global complications like the increases in oil and food prices.

The Nana campaign needs to say that, since 2004, Kufour and NPP have not only shown coherence in tackling economic challenges, part of which involve opening the development front for more national debate as theGhana Telecom/Vodafon issue demonstrates: GDP growth, school feeding, freedom of the press, more gender enhancement to the extend that Alima Mahama, the Minister of Women and Children Affirs, was nearly picked by Nana as vice presidential running mate. Need more?

How about a better performing state institutions not cowed by the imperial threats as thePNDC/NDC did during its almost 20 years in power. There's no need to listen to Atta-Mills’s social democracy rhetorics which he hasn’t practiced, even as head of the Rawlings’ presidential economic commission. The reason is that the NDC, which has about 20 years old history, has been development shenanigans because historically the NPPs have produced better economies from former Prime Minister Kofi Busia to incumbent President John Kufour.

And with development issues still in the forefront of the 2008 campaign, it seems like a no-brainer for Nana to talk about the historical supremacy of development under NPP Heads of State – Edward Akufo-Addo, Kofi Busia and John Kufour. And my last piece of advice to Nana and his NPP campaign team is to just get mad about something. Nana’s campaign seems so intent on projecting him as a “intellectual and politically matured” leader. Well, Ghanaian voters want to see a sense of urgency and outrage in Nana outrage over worsening sanitation, increasing crime, some still inhibiting aspects of the culture, dependence on foreign aid; outrage over increased cost of living, health care and education; an idiotic elites; and outrage over Ghana's loss of prestige over its image as a place where its former President, Rawlings, talks like a child.

To put it bluntly, Nana needs to get outraged over something other than "attacks on NDC mismanagement.” When all the dust settles, Nana can use the NDC’s tattered 20-year record to wrap around its neck and just may be become President Nana Akufo-Addo. No convention or vice-president from the Bank of Ghana pick will matter as much as connecting with voters on key issues in a Ghana where insults and mindlessness drive electioneering campaigns.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, Canada, August 22, 2008