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Opinions of Wednesday, 3 November 2021

Columnist: Dela Coffie

Dela Coffie's thoughts on the leadership paralysis in the NDC

Former President John Dramani Mahama Former President John Dramani Mahama

The postmortem debate over Mahama’s 2020 election loss is still raging. It's been some 11 months after the last elections, and the loser keeps yelling and telling bizarre election fraud story that has already been debunked both in court and in the public space.

Here's the more important part of Mahama's claims, "But for the militarization of the 2020 elections, and ballot stuffing, I would have won."

Indeed, former President John Dramani Mahama has been on and on about this for the umpteenth time. So one would think that party elders would step in and instruct him to shush, but no one seems to care.

Let's assume without admitting that these things happened, how come it didn’t form part of the NDC's case in court? In any event, where is NDC's own collation figures? Isn't it embarrassing that for two consecutive elections- (2016-2020) the NDC's internal collation system failed? Isn't it even more embarrassing that the NDC can't boast of its own collated figures for both the 2016 and 2020 elections as we speak?

It's astonishing that after repeated claims of electoral malfeasance and the worst performances at the Supreme Court, former President Mahama is still not learning lessons from his mistakes, he's still alleging fraud on the street but not in court.

This same Mahama took everyone on a wild goose chase at the Supreme Court and he continues to deflect blame in any direction he can throw it without reflecting on his own failures. The man doesn’t exactly make it easy to stick with him. His stories are literally so outrageous and demonstrably false that you have to be willfully blind to keep going along.

It seems to me that Mahama and his advisors are unaware of the fact that the finger-pointing at the Electoral Commission (EC) has important implications for how the NDC moves forward.

The point must be made clear that Election 2020 has long been over. Attempting to rewrite the rules in order to maintain relevance rather than letting the winners get on with running the business is quite irritating and nauseating.

I appreciate the fact that there could be legitimate electoral grievances, but quite frankly, NDC leaders ought to up their game.

Truly, it is beyond comprehension that the NDC is so poorly led that sidelining the current crop of leaders and devolving their responsibilities to fresh leadership seems to be the only way forward.

Everything ought to change, and that means that Mahama must lead the way and stop the rambling and the irrational drivel that comes from him every now and then.

The NDC needs to move on and deal with weightier matters of party reorganization and get the party back on a proper footing with fresh leadership ahead of election 2024. We need to also push the NDC in a much-needed progressive direction.

Above all, our leaders need to differentiate between those things that are worth challenging and those that are not. If you are always carping incessantly about everything, you lose even more relevance than if you had focussed on the real key issues.