One-touch victory will elude Mahama - Carl Wilson

President John Mahama and the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) will have a tough time in the 7 December polls, a member of the party, Mr. Carl Wilson, has said.

Mr. Wilson, a former Chairman of the Confiscated Vehicles Committee in the Mills administration, told Chief Jerry Forson on Accra100.5FM’s breakfast show Ghana Yensom on Friday, 12 August that: “The 2016 elections will be very interesting. I started saying this about two years ago and the dynamics before us tell me it will be very difficult.”

“I can confirm and I can say here that I’m very sure that the 2016 elections will go into a second round. Nobody is going to win in the first round because the dynamics are there indicating so,” Mr. Wilson, who is now the founder of advocacy group Move Ghana said.

Asked by Chief Jerry Forson about the chances of the NDC in the elections, Mr. Wilson said: “… I know Ghanaians are not satisfied with the governance they are being [served] today, especially the unemployed youth ... You see the propaganda is too much and so it has clouded the indicators by which we can properly gauge the mood and judge how the polls will go. If you take away the propaganda and you face the real issues, they themselves [NDC] know that it will be difficult for them.”

Explaining further, Mr. Wilson said the NDC will have a tough time at the polls because “President John Mahama doesn’t have the youth behind him. The youth that drove him into power in 2012, I don’t believe president Mahama has the youth behind him, he doesn’t and the youth form 70% presence in the voters’ register. People are crying for jobs, people are crying for ways to live.”

He said in 2012, the NDC won the polls with the slogan ‘A Better Ghana Agenda’ and wondered why suddenly, the party has abandoned that slogan for ‘Transforming Ghana, Changing Lives’. “You don’t change a winning formula and then base your whole campaign on infrastructural development which a president in this country some time ago said was an ‘exercise in mediocrity’”.