A flag bearer aspirant of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah has launched his campaign to lead the party into the 2020 presidential election.
He has called on the delegates of the party not to simply vote for whoever they liked but rather the person they believe Ghanaians will vote for in the general election.
For that reason, he has also called on the leadership of the party to undertake a series of opinion polls by neutral professional groups to help the party know which of its aspirants was most likely to receive the support of Ghanaians.
“Spending a few tens of thousands of cedis on research will save the party from spending millions of cedis on the wrong candidate.
This is necessary so that the party’s limited funds are not squandered on any candidate who is unlikely to win a national election.
I shall call consistently on the party to invest in voter opinion research, for its own benefit,” Mr Spio-Garbrah stressed.
Fresh face needed
He posited that NDC members were looking for renewal, re-invigoration, fresh blood, fresh ideas and a fresh leader.
“And this change in NDC that is underway is not a mere whirlwind, not a simple thunderstorm, and not even a devastating cyclone, not a destructive hurricane but an overwhelming tsunami.
It is an earth-moving tsunami, and it will shoot all the way through the national [executive elections] and to the flagbearership, potentially embarrassing anyone who cannot see the trend,” he emphasised.
According to Mr Spio-Garbrah, many NDC leading lights had been caught up in a frenzy to imitate or compete with the New Patriotic Party (NPP) with respect to their love for ostentatious lifestyles and the scramble for individual financial prosperity at the expense of the public good.
“It is against this backdrop of a national malaise, a growing social focus on wealth-by-any-means, a complete drift in national prioritisation, an abandonment of the public interest for the personal interest, rising incidents of corruption in high places, that the Spio-Garbrah Campaign Team has developed a forward agenda (FA) to propose an alternative narrative for the NDC,” he announced.
The forward agenda
In the various choices that needed to be made as a party in opposition to find its way back to power, Mr Spio-Garbrah said, the FA mission was not for the NDC to retreat into the dark, decrepit and depressive defeat of the past but for NDC members to look forward with hope and expectancy towards the bright lights of revival, regeneration, restoration, restitution and successes of the future.
It was his considered view that while the NPP had unabashedly promoted their love for property-ownership, they had also sought to weaken the NDC’s public appeal by carving out a number of populist slogans and social intervention initiatives aimed at cutting off some of the NDC’s natural political base.
“By seeming to respond to the national malaise of poverty and unemployment, through school feeding programmes, the expansion of the National Health Insurance programme, and now free SHS, the NPP has done a good job of eating into the NDC’s traditional strongholds,” he pointed out.
The NPP, he postulated, had been quite successful at appealing to those at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid and gaining their votes.
Source: Graphic.com.gh