It is emerging that three regions, which former President John Dramani Mahama plotted to dribble during his tenure, up to the December 2016 general elections, are bidding goodbye to the smooth-talking, deceptive nice young man.
As we would recollect, that deception was in a scam project called Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), an agricultural model meant to transform 240 districts – from the northern regions through Brong Ahafo to the Volta and Oti region.
Barely a decade on, it turned out that not only is the former President a mere talkative person on the political stage, but that politics has become a theatre for him to play and act and make good cash from the taxpayer and vulnerable farmer and those in the agricultural chain.
That those constituencies in those regions have wised up to his devious antics is manifest in his shunning by them, particularly within this campaign period, when the terrain is getting surfeit with instances of defections, and chiefs openly lauding the transformation that is lighting up every community in these abandoned regions.
Refreshing feedback
The President’s trip along constituencies in these regions is revealing refreshing feedback from true sons and daughters of the land, indicating how President Akufo-Addo’s good governance and development initiatives are touching lives and improving livelihoods.
When chiefs and ordinary people in communities use words like ‘visionary’ and ‘compassionate’, or point out clear projects and development pieces they are seeing and witnessing right under their noses, it tells a better story than what photo-shop technology, shrill propaganda or infantile presentations can throw up. From farmers and buyers through retail traders on markets to their wards in schools, the evidence is unmistakable and louder than the NDC’s shrill, but empty propaganda.
That story is the same in the Volta Region where the party had, before, looked foreign and unfriendly, despite the presence of landmark NPP projects there and the fact that the party they had supported for decades only took them for granted, while craving feverishly for their votes in each election.
Credibility
In all of these constituencies where the President has visited, the propaganda and lies that had been thrown at the party by mean politicians without scruples have been fazing under the reality of the pieces of development dotted around every stretch in the respective regions where he has interacted with the chiefs and people.
The message therefore is simple: the electorate may be fooled by vicious propaganda, but only for some time. In the end, however, these same electorate may be compelled – when the situation bites them hard – to admit that a good husband or wife will always be one, without splitting the eardrums of neighbours to demand vain recognition.
Bloated Mahama
As far as we can tell, the feedback from the campaigns of the two presidential candidates are in opposite directions – with Mahama caught daily in demolition messages and the community looking askance; or Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo communicating and relating with the chiefs and people – with resounding applause and appreciation.
A serious party will do well monitoring these campaigns and signaling the former President to change his communication style and connect with the electorate.
Unfortunately, because they are desperate and not willing to learn anything, they move on, steeped in the demolition frenzy, when all the electorate want is trust and hope as well as assurance and commitment to campaign promises.
Isn’t it strange that, barely six weeks into the crucial 2020 general elections, the NDC fails to grasp that it is dead stuck in the mud, even before the electorate swarm to the polling stations in the coming weeks to retain Nana Akufo-Addo and kick out into ignominy John Dramami Mahama.
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