Former President John Mahama has a right to stage a come back in 2020 as flagbearer for the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), former Presidential Staffer Dr. Clement Apaak has stated.
The Builsa South Member of Parliament believes the return of Mahama who suffered an emphatic defeat in the hands of the New Patriotic Party’s Nana Akufo-Addo at the 2016 polls, is what the NDC needs to recapture power.
The former President during a meeting with his former appointees declared his willingness to support whoever emerges as candidate for the NDC going into the 2020 elections.
“And I am saying that whoever leads the party, I’m a committed member, I’ll support that person to the hilt. And, so, going on air and blaming so and so for this and that, I don’t think it helps the unity [of the party]. At this time we must be standing together,” he said.
He continued: “If you ride a lame horse into a race and you lose the race, your priority must be to cure the lameness of the horse and not about who’ll ride the horse again.
“You have to cure the horse and make sure it’s no longer lame. And once you have a fit, healthy horse, it will throw up who the jockey should be. And so absolutely, I believe that the issue of leadership is based on the dynamics of the time.
“If we do our work well, we do good branch reorganization, bring it to the constituency level, to the regional level and have a strong, healthy party; the dynamics of the time will determine who should lead the party”.
Many have interpreted the statement of the former President to mean he has given up on a possible return. However, speaking on Starr Today with Bernard Nasaara Saibu, Dr. Apaak refuted such assertions.
According to him, Mahama will stage a comeback once the challenges that led to the party’s defeat are fixed collectively.
“If you listen to the tape very carefully, there was no instance or occasion or anything to suggest that the former president was excluding himself from being that jockey who will ride the horse to help us regain power in 2020.
“The point is very clear and of course that is what you do as a good leader as a democrat and of course you must also recognize that age is on his side, many other factors are indeed in his favor”.
He added that nobody should count out the former President in the NDC’s 2020 flagbearship race.
“If you ask me as somebody who was intensely involved in the labour movements in Canada and North America, we always had a concept that we describe as the right of first refusal and in my own assessment, the right of first refusal indicates that when somebody has occupied a particular position before, for all intents and purposes when that position becomes available again, then quiet clearly you can expect until the person excludes him or herself in emphatic and direct terms you can never count that person out”.
