NDC NOT BROKEN -Betty Mould

A Vice-Chairperson of the NDC, Mrs Betty Mould-Iddrisu says the NDC is not broken. According to her, the seeming tensions within the party are real but are normal in politicking.

The onetime Attorney-General and Minister of Justice made these statements yesterday in reaction to an article which appeared on some websites and has made the rounds on social media. The article claimed the NDC was a broken party that needed to be mended. According to her, even political parties like the UK Conservative Party and the American Republican Party whose leaders have ‘won’ general elections are undergoing barrages of criticism on a daily basis.

“Articles like this are meant to deceive our members. Our front is NOT broken! Indeed when we call party meetings, members both young and old attend in their numbers. We have a Founder, an active Council of Elders, a National Chairman and Leader, a Functional Executive and National Executive Committee. All these bodies and persons meet and run the NDC on a day by day basis. I know because I am at the party office almost daily. Surely, there are disagreements sometimes publicly and others privately held and settled one way or the other. That is politics! The NPP had no National Chairman or General-Secretary but they won a general election in 2016. It was without doubt one of the fatal flaws of our campaign: believing the NPP’s internal power struggles irredeemably destroyed its chances of winning a general election. Please, I will never subscribe to the assertion that the NDC or Akatamanso is broken …it is a FALSE hypothesis.”

In the reply she posted on social media, Mrs. Betty Mould Iddrisu who was also onetime Minister of Education said the NDC has survived breakaway splinter groups such as the Reform Party (RP) in 1999 and the Democratic Freedom Party (DFP) in 2007. She said in spite of these breakaway, the NDC led by Prof. J.E.A. Mills went on to win the 2008 General election. She noted that today, the leaders of these splinter groups such as Goozie Tanoh and Dr. Obed Asamoah are back in the fold of the NDC and together with the likes of Ato Ahwoi, Huudu Yahya, Doe Adjaho, Totobi Quakyi, Alhaji Iddrisu Mahama, Captain Kojo Tsikata (rtd) and many more, the NDC is even stronger.
“As a party, the NDC is currently poised to implement the recommendations contained in the Review Committee Report (popularly known as the Kwesi Botchwey Report). We must not be distracted from this course and lay the foundation for re-energizing our over 22,000 branches nationwide which are the base on which our umbrella sits and covers us all. We are going to hold our branch elections before the end of2017. Thereafter in 2018, we intend holding the constituency & regional elections paving the way for our national congress to be held by the end of 2018 to elect our flagbearer and other national officeholders,” she explained.
According to Mrs. Mould-Iddrisu, the re-organization of the party is taking place against a backdrop of a humbling loss in the 2016 elections. She said the so-called ‘victory’ of the NPP has brought in its wake dramas, persecutions, intimidations, threats to the rule of law and many more social, economic and political aberrations which are occurring almost on a daily basis. She decried the mass manipulation of the public services which has seen mass demotions, transfers, cancellation or termination of contracts and outright dismissals of persons perceived to be NDC loyalists. “These acts are shocking and brazen coming from a party that professes to be apostles of democracy and defenders of the rule of law. For those of us old enough to remember, these happenings are echoes of politics of Dr KA Busia & ceremonial President, Edward Akufo-Addo’s ‘Apollo 568’ saga in which 568 public and civil servants were “sacked” by them. She said it took the law courts to restore dignity and stop their actions in 1969”.
She noted that as happened in the Busia era, there are a plethora of law suits challenging the actions of the NPP government in the arena of public sector employment. “No, the Umbrella is NOT broken. We are merely extending the cover you can use to protect the members.
Surely, I will write again on this subject. Thank you”, she concluded.