Trust is a commodity that fires any home, relationship, business, institution or organisation and community to get mutual results.
When trust is broken, nothing else works, including mutual relationship, benefits, results and rewards.
The forthcoming December 7 presidential and parliamentary elections are about trust and who we should commit the fortunes of the nation to, at this critical period in world history, when leaping is preferred to crawling or walking; and when Africa is confronted more with disunity arising from ethnicity than consumed grand vision and agenda to join the rest of the world through digitization of its systems and structures.
Tale of the tape
Two leading contenders will be fighting the December 7, 2020 elections to the hilt, with the rest of the parties and presidential candidates likely to be participating for the records.
The combatants, however, will be the same duo who fought in the 2012 and 2016 elections that culminated in one controversial win for John Mahama and a thumping, landslide win for the incumbent President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
Before that, the NDC, afraid of the quality of opposition it would be facing in Nana Akufo-Addo, had sought to smear him as a bellicose, caustic politician who conceived and delivered a Kume Preko in which people died. They, however, failed to admit that the bullets came from their (NDC) own nozzles.
Strangely, children who at that time had their parents wiping their noses are the very trumpeters of that propaganda.
Nana Akufo-Addo had won his presidential primaries hands down in 2016 in a fairly contested battle, while John Mahama had been smuggled through the backdoor by a cabal who had taken advantage of the constitutional exit of Jerry John Rawlings to constitute themselves into village chieftains.
While the naming of John Mahama as running mate went through democratic processes and raised little storm, the NDC Chairman of the Council of Elders, Harry Sawyer, had queried the cabal’s decision over trust; so did the founder of the NDC, Chairman Rawlings, who was locked out of the meeting by the bunch of pretenders.
Nana Akufo-Addo lost by a whisker in 2008 to the late Professor John Evans Atta Mills. It wasn’t the same story or margin in 2012. Indeed, but for the intervention of then Electoral Commissioner, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, Mahama would have gone into history as a political bum. Fortunately for him, he had the Supreme Court granting him the benefit of the doubt as an inducted President.
Level field
As the world would come to realize, Mahama fell in 2016, having fallen as a President who inherited an eight per cent growth but dropped it through a mix of incompetence and corruption to three.
Exposed and now bereft of partnerships, it was only a matter of time before he could be further exposed in the estimation of the electorate that had earlier bought the lies he and his paymasters had traded to keep afloat till 2016.
Mahama record
Before John Mahama, the electorate didn’t really have any standards to assess his worth as a leader. However, the leadership talisman that Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has shown has been enough to point out that politics can no longer be ‘borborbor’ and ‘kpanlogo’ or youth jamborees led by babies in diapers.
Mahama’s handling of dubious initiatives like Aayalolo, SADA, GYEEDA, SUBAH, as well as his pet project ‘Kofi Dubai Circle,’ which came to us at huge costs but ended up breeding flooding and fires at the Business Districts of Accra, all turned out to be ample evidence of his poor judgment, stark incompetence and emptiness of vision for a President of Ghana.
This is in sharp contrast with the sterling leadership qualities of President Akufo-Addo that has put Ghana back on the map, and attracting partnerships across the entire globe in a post-COVID-19 world.
If 2020 is therefore about trust, the records are clear – portraying Mahama as a fingerling where Nana Akufo-Addo has proven himself a giant.
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