Many years ago, Ghana boasted of two great footballers; Jones Attuquayefio and Sunday Ibrahim who played for and captained Accra Great Olympics and Asante Kotoko respectively.
These two teams then had very large following in all parts of the country. And as fate would have it, these two teams were drawn to play in the semifinals of the African Club Championship, now the CAF Champions League.
The fight for bragging rights did not start in recent days. It began many decades ago. Back then, Jones Attuquayefio and Sunday Ibrahim started the mind-game to convince their teeming supporters which team was going to qualify for the club final championship.
Kotoko had just painfully lost their dependable goal stopper, Robert Mensah, who was stabbed in Tema. Those were very hard times for Kotoko.
In response to Jones Attuquayefio, the “braggadocious”, Sunday Ibrahim in his calm disposition responded, “the field will decide”.
We have digressed a little today just to make a point. However, if this was an essay for a stern English teacher, the teacher would just run his red pen through with the remark, “you have deviated”. In this instance, we have not deviated, but we digressed to make the point that despite the numerous polls by Mussa Dankwah’s Global Info Analytics and Fitch Solutions predicting victory for John Mahama and his NDC in the December 7, 2024 elections, our response to them like Ibrahim Sunday said in 1971 is “the voters in the over 38,000 polling stations would decide who wins the December 7, 2024 elections”.
We know the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) has not dismissed any polls conducted by Mussa Dankwah even at the time the party was yet to elect a presidential candidate. We wonder where Mussa Dankwah learnt his research methods skills to start a study between Mahamudu Bawumia and Alan Kyerematen on one hand and his candidate, John Mahama on the other.
The attempt to set the agenda about who wins the December 7 polls started way back in early 2023. Whatever such research results were meant for, only Mussa Dankwah is in a position to tell Ghanaians. Nobody can underestimate research. However, the benefit of a good study is that it helps with evidence to support your argument. In contrast, the risks associated with poorly applied research methodology are that the researcher will not be able to answer the research questions, or the study will be biased.
And that is what Mussa Dankwah and his Global Info Analytics have succeeded in doing. Mussa Dankwah is not only playing on the intelligence of the Ghanaian voters, but somehow he has succeeded in gaining a kind of recognition from Fitch Solutions with his prediction that John Mahama is heading for a 54 percent victory on December 7.
We do not begrudge Fitch Solutions except to reassure Ghanaians not to rely on polls but await patiently the verdict of the people. In 2016, during the heat of the electioneering, Fitch Solutions wanted to be unique among the numerous pollsters who did not give the NPP the dog’s chance because of its internal wrangling, and, therefore, predicted victory for then candidate Akufo-Addo but warned of a re-run.
Fellow Ghanaians, what happened in 2016? Did Fitch Solutions get it right? Since then we concluded that the “solutions” Fitch Solutions predicted in 2016 was fake or false, and therefore there was the need for change of name from Fitch Solutions to “Fake Solutions.”
Polls are good as a guide, but these predictions that we call phony are not cast in stone. The NDC decided to run to town with the predictions of the Fitch Solutions on account of the economic challenges resulting in the weak cedi and poor living standards.
But is that all that an opposition political party like the NDC needs to win power? Certainly, a government does not have to rely on perceived failure of a sitting government to re-capture power.
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