The Spokesperson for the defunct Armed Forces Revolutionary Council Government, Major (Rtd.) Boakye Gyan says the power struggle within the ruling NDC is targeted at the imminent oil resources, and could plunge Ghana into a civil war.
Commenting on recent squabbles within the ruling party on Citi FM’s Eyewitness News on Friday November 12, Major Boakye Gyan said the NDC is being rift apart by a mixture of factors, with the most prominent being what he calls the Ideological divide, ethnic divide and the generational divide.
He however noted that Ghana’s oil is a great motivation to the re-emergence of the battle for the soul of the NDC. He said the protagonists in the struggle are the camps of Ex President Jerry John Rawlings and Professor John Evans Atta Mills. “We are about to drop oil and it is going to be a huge try for us. Because I have always held that apart from Gabon, no African country has had oil without passing through a civil war of some sort.
Nigeria didn’t avoid it in the 1960s; Sudan is going through it, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Angola and the rest. Ghana may change the trend, but giving looking at w
I don’t know what form it will take but it would be a destruction of a kind because the stakes are high and people are not just going to take things lying down. The NPP took the oil thing to the highest and brought people like Kosmos and others and then they left office, and all of a sudden the baton is changing. People have developed some expectations. At least, if Kosmos had been around, certain expectations that have been defeated would have been alive” he said.
Major Boakye Gyan noted that the struggle for the oil revenue would go beyond the ruling NDC government to involve other opposition parties, if the Government fails to manage it properly.
Asked whether he thinks the Former First Lady Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings truly had ambitions to vie for the presidency, Major Boakye Gyan said if she had no interest, she would have openly advised against it as a national Vice Chairperson.
"The danger is that, because she hasn’t shown decisiveness, in the long-term, she is hurting her own credibility and chances of becoming a President because being a Leader is about being decisive. And also the people who are rooting for her, have not clearly come out to spell out clearly a programme or ideological position that they expect Konadu to take that is distinctively different from what Mills is doing. So in that respect, I question their motivation. The motivation is to be in power and do what other people who have no ideological commitment do to dip their hands in the money and use it the way they want” he suggested.
“If you have done what you could in nineteen years, then what is left for you to do? Because if they were able to solve the problems they are complaining about now, then there would be no more problems for them to solve. The inability for the Rawlings camp to put up an ideological option that upstages Mills’ agenda for Better Ghana makes me suspicious” he stated.
Major Boakye Gyan also questioned Mr. Rawlings’ description of the Mills administration as slow.
“People claim to have better perceptions of what they can do for Ghana. For instance if you say that Mills is slow, I find that very invidious in the sense that, there is nowhere in the NDC Manifesto where it is written that when Mills comes in and he is promoting his Better Ghana Agenda, he will go at 100 miles per hour or certain speed. Whose concept of slow is that? And these are some of the things that make me suspicious that they are using things that are populist in nature to gunner support for different reasons”.
Major Boakye Gyan rubbished Mr. Rawlings’ claim that the Mills administration has not been tough on corrupt Ex-officials.
“The idea of sitting on a party that you formed and caressing it like a baby is wrong. If somebody is corrupt, there is a machinery to prosecute him so if the Government has tried and failed, then it means that those former government officials did nothing wrong. We must remember that the PNDC is the only regime that has not been questioned after ten years. If that possibility becomes a reality tomorrow, the people who will lose more are the Rawlingses so If I were them, I wouldn’t do anything to disturb the reconciliation and stability that Kufuor had created that has given them a cover" he said.
Source: citifmoline
