John Mahama
A former Minister of Defence and a leading member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Benjamin Kunbour, has called on the party’s twice-defeated flagbearer, John Dramani Mahama, to call his ‘sycophantic’ boys to order.
According to Dr Kunbuor, such sycophants who are insisting that the party should return the former president as its automatic flagbearer for the 2024 general elections are only creating enemies for the man whose interest they claim to champion.
He describes as “childish and premature” the ongoing discussions about who becomes the party’s 2024 flagbearer.
He further contends that the actions of Mr Mahama’s loyalists also have the potential to destroy the NDC’s reorganisation drive aimed at annexing power from the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) in 2024.
Speaking on Accra based JoyNews TV, Dr Kunbour stated that the NDC’s mechanism and systems must be allowed to operate rather than imposing individuals on the party.
“John Mahama has his presence, a leading and formidable person in the party, but does that mean that John Mahama himself accepts that he is now in control of the party? I do not believe that is the way he thinks. People should not be in a hurry to invent enemies for John Mahama.
“I don’t know the motivation for the people to want to sandbar John Mahama in that way…It is childish, uninformed, unscientific and anti-John Mahama. I believe he will deal with it,” he said.
Some loyalists of the former President have been making calls for Mr Mahama to be made the party’s flagbearer for the 2024 general election.
The Member of Parliament for Builsa South, Dr Clement Abas Apaak, the MPs for North Tongu and Ningo Prampram, Sam Okudzeto Ablakwa and Sam George, respectively, think Mahama must be the obvious choice for the 2024 election.
Dr Apaak, for instance, has insisted that former President John Dramani Mahama won the 2020 presidential election but was denied his mandate by institutions whose leaderships were “handpicked by his competitor to do just that”.
“Mahama, therefore, deserves a free pass to reclaim his stolen mandate…only JM can rescue Ghana,” he has said.
He maintains that NDC stands to lose the 2024 general elections if it presents another candidate other than Mr Mahama.
Credibility problem
Meanwhile, Dr Kunbour has also called on leaders of the party to respond to calls by members for details on how many votes its flagbearer obtained in the 2020 polls.
He stated: “Immediately after the elections, results were coming, we started seeing figures. For the ordinary party member, you said we had won the elections through the figures and collation that the party had done. Why is it that those figures did not find their way to the court?
“That is a fundamental question. It is a valid question because when you go back and I still have a number of those figures, that in this region we got this, in this region we got this, we are running into a credibility problem here. Political accountability is vertical and horizontal. People don’t know today: what exactly are the collated figures?”
NDC’s soul
Over the weekend, Dr Kunbour cautioned the party against holding conversations around the selection of a flagbearer for Election 2024 at this time.
According to him, the party should rather focus on reorganisation, saying it will be a serious political blunder for the NDC to narrow its problems to getting a flagbearer to lead the party into the next elections.
Speaking at the ‘Securing NDC’s Future’ forum in Tema, Dr Kunbuor said the party’s challenges go beyond succession to internal wrangling and weak cohesion.
He also bemoaned the absence of systems and structures to deal with internal politics, saying that is an affront to the party’s cohesion and unity.
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