Leadership is a deep and heavy responsibility that requires some unique ingredients to be able to execute that duty at the family, community and national levels. One must be a person of character and timber to be in leadership, especially at the national level, let alone seek the mandate of the people to be head of state.
One key ingredient is integrity or honesty, which means that those who seek that mandate will speak the truth at all times even on the political platforms.
That appears to be missing in the engagements of the NDC whenever it is seeking the mandate of the people, and one of the references was the wild claims Mr. Mahama and his NDC made that the Electoral Commission (EC) rigged the 2020 polls in favour of the NPP.
They filed a petition before the Supreme Court, and defended their reliefs before the court. But when their petition was dismissed in 2021, Mahama lampooned the Supreme Court for shooting down his reliefs.
Almost two years on, a leading member of the NDC has come to speak the truth that after all the NDC did not compile the results of the 2020 elections.
Listen to what Mahama said about the Supreme Court verdict in 2021. “This is a clear stab in the heart of transparency and accountability to the sovereign people of Ghana, but also on our nation’s electoral system, which has deepened grave doubts harboured by many Ghanaians about the true outcome of the December 2020 presidential election,” Mr. Mahama said in March 2021 after the verdict by the Supreme Court.
We have always asked Ghanaians to always scrutinise Mahama’s public “outbursts” because they lack credibility, but a section of the people think we have been overly critical of the “serial” presidential candidate for no stated reason. To those people, we invite them to also listen to Prof. Kpessa Whyte, the man who represented John Mahama in the EC strong room during the 2020 elections and juxtapose it with the claims by the NDC flagbearer.
We know also that one of the principles of lawyers is the insistence that “he who calls for equity must come with clean hands,” and that being the case we shall regularly subject Mahama’s pronouncements to the integrity test to ensure that his promises are no longer tongue in cheek.
Prof. Kpessa Whyte said last week almost two and half years after the Supreme Court pronounced on the election petition that his party was unable to collate its results for the 2020 presidential election. He also added that the officials of the NDC at the EC strong room never got the NDC’s collated results to challenge the EC’s final declaration.
Mr. Asiedu Nketia, then General Secretary and now Chairman of the party, has made a similar claim. The question for any right-thinking person to ask is: if these officials knew this, why did they mount the witness box at the Supreme Court to state that the EC had rigged the election for President Akufo-Addo? The NDC is a danger to our democracy if they don’t mend their ways and turn their back to the Goebbelsian lies in their attempt to win power.
Some leading members of the party are the serpents thwarting the progress of our democratic rule. We, therefore, urge the Ghanaian electorate to be eternally vigilant to strip the NDC lies “naked”.