The National Democratic Congress (NDC) lost the last elections because it was “complacent”, Abdul-Malik Kweku Baako, the editor-in-chief of the New Crusading Guide, has said.
Opposition leader and three-time presidential candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) won December’s poll by 53.85 per cent of presidential votes, defeating incumbent John Mahama, who managed 44.40 per cent and trailed by more than one million votes.
The NPP also won a majority in parliament, after annexing 171 seats in the poll; the NDC will now form the minority in parliament, seeing its 148 seats in the sixth parliament shrink to 107.
And as the post-mortem continues into the electoral loss of the NDC, Mr Baako, contributing to the discussion on what may have led to the party’s defeat, said: “The party NDC went to bed. If you look at the election results, particularly if you take it from the perspective of the outcome of the parliamentary [election], you would not be surprised… You would realise that the Members of Parliament, the parliamentary candidates, the campaign team, the district chief executive as well as the metropolitan and municipal groups, I think they all went to bed. They were complacent, they were over-confident. They were thinking that the president’s image and the projects that had been launched and the almighty Green Book was the magic wand that could win them the elections.”
He said in addition, the NDC’s strategy of “recycling of discredited, worn-out propaganda” against Mr Akufo-Addo, some dating back to two decades and the “consistent attacks” on his person, worked against its chances.
However, he added the NPP’s efforts in its success at the poll should not be overlooked as it worked “very, very hard”.
According to Mr Baako, the party’s decision to “refocus” and “work”, putting in measures to collate poll figures right from the polling station level – having taken a leaf from its experiences in the 2012 election petition, which it lost – as well as electoral reforms by the Electoral Commission, helped its cause.
“That for me alone told me this was a party that had learnt its lessons and had decided to improve and to enhance its architecture in terms of election campaigns,” the veteran journalist said on Multi TV’s Newsfile on Saturday December 17.
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
