Surely, it takes the grassroots elements to build the foundation and ensure a winsome political machine in multiparty democracy. For instance, the crucial role the NPP foot-soldiers played during the days leading up to the general election in 2016, without doubt, resulted in the matchless victory for Nana Akufo-Addo to become Ghana’s president. On that score, it is not out of place for the ruling NPP to acknowledge and show appreciation for the rock-steady vigilance and grassroots initiatives by the Delta Force, especially before and during the elections. The Delta Force as a vigilante group, indeed, is one of the notable foot-soldiers of the NPP. For that reason alone the top echelons of the party must reassure the gallant grassroots that their effort will not be in vain, and that they will always form an important bloc of the NPP extraction.
Having said that, someone also needs to have “adult conversations” with, and hammer home seriously to those brothers forming the Delta Force that time is long, long overdue for them to grow up, mature, and try to move away from their seemingly sense of entitlement. Almost everyone in Ghana knows the Delta Force played active part in helping to propel NPP and Nana Addo to the finished line in 2016. Yet, it does not mean the ruling NPP is unalterably indebted to any of its so-called vigilante forces, in terms of jobs, money, or any special favors on the presumption that the groups’ yeoman efforts led to NPP’s electoral victory.
Granted the preceding assumption that Delta Force’s singular sweat brought NPP this far, one will then be inclined to ask what sense does it make for a particular group(s) to put in every effort to strengthen and help contribute to the success of a political party, but ends up trying to undermine the very party it painstakingly helped into power? Does Delta Force truly understand the extent of the negative impact the recklessness and sporadically violent attitudes are exacting on the ruling NPP government the vigilantes boastfully claims they sent to power?
It is depressing to see once-upon-the-time effective party campaign group such as Delta Force willfully and masterfully engaging in the shameful act of throwing juicy “red meats” on the paths of the hungry political hyenas scavenging around the “zoo” of the opposition or in the NDC camp. Obviously, only heavens know the scope of the damage or havoc Mahama-led NDC government wreaked on the socioeconomic health of this country. To that end, the shameless ex-President Mahama and his teeming supporters always need a cover-up or distraction; so, they lay in wait to seize on anything from the NPP’s end to blow it out of proportion, while proclaiming: “We told you so.”
By its thuggish behaviors here and there, the Delta Force, to a larger degree, is freely throwing “red meats” at the power-greedy former president Mahama and his corrupt NDC hangers-on to feast on. If Delta Force genuinely likes the NPP, by now it should have sensibly dawned on its members that whenever they take the laws into their own uncivilized hands, slowly but surely it is preparing a fertile soil for NDC to grow its seed of cynical propaganda against Nana Addo and his administration.
Unquestionably, it is alarming spectacle sitting back almost helplessly watching the Delta Force or other vigilante bloc affiliated with the ruling NPP, for that matter, and naively behaving in ways that liberally provide live ammunitions for the opposition stationed perpetually in the firing range of the national discourse arena to shoot indiscriminately at the government of the day. Actually, no sane person will defend the actions of any group whose stock-in-trade is lawless vigilantism that spreads across town to torment law-abiding people and state institutions under the pretext that it is connected to the government in power.
Undeniably, Delta Force’s vicious attacks are indefensibly disgraceful. Sometimes, though, one begins to brainstorm some varying opinions as to whether or not all the people who commit those deplorable acts in the name of Delta Force are bona fide members as they claim to be. Because the group’s disorderly activities not only defies rational logic but also they put needless blot on NPP as Ghanaian political tradition that has iconic reputation and profound commitment for promoting the rule of law based on fairness and democratic governance.
In short, the Delta Force activists might have gotten some legitimate concerns or differences regarding the trajectories of NPP since it won power in 2016. But, the tactics used by Delta Force in the bid to get what they believe they deserve is barbaric and the same time unrealistic. Much as many of us recognize the priceless toils of all the subgroups of the NPP in dislodging the NDC from power, the Delta Force must be taught to understand, once and for all that, it takes collective endeavors, including non-members of NPP, to win elections.
No matter what, true and loving members of a given lineage do not supply “red meat’ and hand it on a silver platter to one’s bitterest nemeses so they can recharge their energy level effortlessly to enable them deploy more attacks back at their opponents. Regrettably, that is exactly what Delta Force is doing: Selfishly throwing “red meats” at the detractors of NPP!
The writer, Bernard Asubonteng, is based in US.
By Bernard Asubonteng