Posted: Daily Guide |www.dailyguideghana.com
Thursday, 09 September 2010
By Charles Takyi-Boadu
The struggle for power in the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was taken to another level yesterday when Mills’ bloc claimed victory over the founder, Jerry Rawlings and his faction.
This was when a member of the Mills’ camp, Alhaji Iddrisu Bature, made claims on Adom FM’s morning show that the Mills camp had succeeded in taming or confining Rawlings to the cooler.
Bature was responding to claims by a youth activist of the party and General Secretary for the Youth for Leadership (YFL), a pro-Rawlings group, Sacut Amenga-Etego that President Mills ‘lacks wise counsel’ in his administration.
Sacut stated in his latest articles to the press that he was sure the biggest problem of President Mills was that of the lack of wise counselors, noting with emphasis “I’m even surer that he needs an inclination for that kind of desired wise counsel- an inclination the president has woefully failed to demonstrate since he became President.”
He proceeded to ask a rhetorical question: “why, how can any leader ever lead successfully without the benefit of such counsel?” stressing “perhaps, only in an Atta Mills Presidency can people delude themselves with such a notion.”
Among other things, the youth activist claimed that the President was not living up to the virtues of the June 4 revolution on which the NDC, as a party, was founded.
These claims by Sacut triggered Alhaji Bature to shoot out of his shell, strongly defending President Mills.
In the heat of the argument on the radio, Alhaji Bature said people like Sacut meant nothing to the Mills camp since they had ‘finished’ the founder of the party, adding “don’t you see we have finished Rawlings. Why can’t we hear from him again?”
Bature wondered what Sacut and his other colleagues who made claims of owing unflinching allegiance to Jerry Rawlings could do since they are now ‘small flies’.
For him, the only thing that these Rawlings followers could do, would be to destroy the chances of the party in 2012 and not that of Mills as a person since according to him, the President was God-given and the best thing to have happened to Ghana as a country.
“What is the difference between you that you cannot use official channels to resolve, you need to go to the media often to expose and embarrass the President,” he asked.
Instead, Bature said Professor Mills was prepared to resign as President and nothing would happen to him, predicting that “it is the NDC that will suffer.”
However, spokesman for the former President, Kofi Adams said nobody could confine Rawlings to silence and that he would speak when he had to.
“Who is in the position to do so? When he has to talk, he will talk.”
Mr. Adams laughed away suggestions that Alhaji Bature is a leading member of the NDC since according to him “we don’t have anything like a leading member.
We have executives; I don’t know him as a leading member. Who does he lead in the NDC?”
That notwithstanding, he said the founder of the party would not allow any individual or group of persons to influence his thoughts and that he would speak when the need arose.