WE NEED APPOINTEES WHO CAN JELL WITH FOOT SOLDIERS AND THE GROUNDS

After all the higgledy-piggledy, the President, His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has been inducted into the office to prosecute his Four More For Nana agenda and mandate.

As is normal for an astute politician like the President, he now has a fair idea of the worth of his candidates, but also those who he appointed to prosecute his developmental initiatives for the various sectors in maintaining economic growth and improving lives and livelihoods.

Quiet revolution

And he has shown evidence that he will be igniting a cleansing of the stables by his dismantling of the Committee on Illegal Mining which was saddled with strategic responsibilities to reform the mining sector to mutually benefit actors and state.

Unfortunately, as we were to witness, the Committee woefully failed to deliver. As a consequence, the NPP suffered electoral losses in the Western, Eastern, and Ashanti Regions where illegal mining is predominantly the lead informal economy job, despite the high-risk nature of the trade and its threat to ecology and our natural resources.

Electoral history

Looking back into our history, we find – intriguingly – that most of the time, when an incumbent government underperforms, the party’s woes are linked to the party abandoning cadres or foot soldiers or failing to connect with the grounds, for that matter.

For both the NPP and NDC, it is a reality that each election year and issues have arisen after the elections.

Charges

As we all know, performance in elections has a relation with competence and delivery, with the history of party electoral misfortunes being linked to appointees ignoring party boys and girls and failing to connect generally with the electorate.

We have interestingly in our anger and frustration, particularly since 1992, referred to such appointees simply as ‘arrogant’ and ‘greedy bastards,’ depending on the temperature of our anatomy and magnitude of the case.

An annoying case in point is how the Zongo communities voted and how badly the President’s candidates fared in such constituencies.

Instead of candidates of the NPP effectively touching the grounds and latching onto the President’s Free SHS Programme to deliver the constituency seats, there were reports about them looking in the direction of their stomachs as logistics like sanitizers and T-shirts meant rather a distribution got locked in stores, inuring to the benefit of the NDC. That may be huge evidence that the party appointee and candidate failed to connect with the ground in one way or the other.

‘Before’ and ‘after’

We forget the fact that people see and know where we come from before we have glory thrust upon us. While naked envy may behind most of the needless and empty accusations, it still remains a fact that any politician in our part of the world, who ignores the caution to moderate his lifestyle, tends to fall victim to the canker that culminates in the telltale ‘skirt and blouse’ voting that is manifesting in the unheralded attrition in Parliament among our Members of Parliament on both sides of the House.

In appointing his new crop of ministers, including ambassadors and Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs), we believe the President would also connect with the ground through his intelligence networking in ensuring that appointees are not people who drop from space and live away from drudgeries that assail us and which such appointees have been invited to fight.

We must, together, ensure that this time, we will have a team that will be prepared to ride on their own steam to a collective victory in 2024 and ensure that the victory that eluded us in 2008 will not repeat itself in 2024.