RAWLINGS A THORN IN THE FLESH OF MILLS?

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…Kofi Adams Confirms More Lashings For Prez! Mr. Kofi Adams, the Spokesperson of former President Fl. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, has said that his boss would continue to speak publicly to push President Atta Mills to live up to the hard line positions the ruling NDC campaigned on in the run-up to election 2008 until the President and party came back to those positions! Among some of these positions are that the ‘real’ killers of the Ya Na and Issa Mobilla should be identified and that the sale of Ghana Telecom to Vodafone should be reversed. He has also confirmed that it is likely that the former President would continue with his public criticisms of the Atta Mills Administration in spite of concerns that these criticisms could turn President Atta Mills into a ‘one-term President’. This is because any attempt to advice President Atta Mills privately may be misconstrued as attempting to control the President. Kofi Adams was speaking to this newspaper in reaction to a publication in Kwesi Pratt’s Insight newspaper of yesterday that stated that some people were busy trying to turn President Atta Mills into a one-term President and these people were being inspired by some of the pronouncements of former President Rawlings. According to Mr. Adams, some of the people who are now criticizing the pronouncements of Rawlings are latter day saints who seem to think that they believe in the NDC and its President even more than those who founded the NDC. Mr. Adams told this newspaper yesterday that former President Rawlings has not said anything different from what he has been saying since he bounced on the political atmosphere of this country and that he has the right to continue to say what he believes and what he so thinks. “Persons who today tend to think that they are the ones who love NDC more and loves Ghana more than its founding fathers should advice themselves,” Mr. Adams said. He said that former President Rawlings significantly campaigned on the NDC platform to get President Mills and the NDC elected. He said that President Mills and the NDC were elected premised on certain postures and issues. He said that in the minds of former President Rawlings the NDC seems not to be carrying out some of the agendas based on which the people voted for the party. “His belief is that we could be better or faster or quicker on most of the issues on which we campaigned on,” he said. He said that it would be a mistake to look at the economy alone since governance was not just about bread and butter, and rather the NDC campaigned on issues like Issa Mobilla, the killing of the Ya Na and the opposition to the sale of GT to Vodafone. “If we campaigned on a platform that we would deal with the Issa Mobilla case, what have we done beyond the two corporals who were arrested? Are we admitting as a party and as a government that the arrest of those two corporals is enough, that we would not look beyond those two corporals and find out who ordered them to do what they did? Are we saying that we are so satisfied?” he wondered. “If we talk about the case of the Ya Na, can we continue to allow the killers of the Ya Na to be walking free?” he lamented. He said that the NDC campaigned on the alleged rot created by the NPP when it was in power and said that this ‘rot’ cannot be allowed to continue. “It becomes a wrong when you have the chance to correct it and you fail to do so and he thinks in his mind, if we work on the premise that the NPP committed wrongs, we would be allowing the wrongs to become endemic and become a part and parcel of society if we don’t by our actions investigate and deal with those wrongs,” he said. “If we take the sale of Ghana Telecom, what was our position? We were opposed to it, and a lot of people supported our positions. What have we done, have we done much to show our opposition to it still? And he thinks that sitting back and hearing what the people tell him, they are not happy,” he said. He said that it was on these reasons that people voted for them to come to power and if they fail to live up to these aspirations they would be sent back into opposition, and his warning was not just to the President but to his entire party. “If the president becomes a one term president then the party becomes a one-term party. So it is an advice and a warning to all of us to wake up to the realization that we were voted for on some premises most of which is not necessarily economic,” he said. Asked why Rawlings does not choose less public forums to address his grievances, he said that any attempt to do so privately may be misconstrued as seeking to control the President. He said that the criticisms were not directed at the president alone, but at various other appointees. “It goes beyond the presidency. You cannot be spending all your time going from the president to one place to another place. The last time we tried to go round to speak on a few things, to speak to people one on one some people complained that he was interfering. If he goes to the President now the next time it would be that he had ordered the president to do so and so. So he wants to use other platforms that he has always used,” he said. He wondered why some people thought that they could not be seen to be publicly repudiating some of the positions they took in times past, but expected Rawlings to do so. “It is politically immature for one to think that one has a position for which he must be seen as credible by society, but thinks that another person must not seem to have a principled position on issues,” he said. He lashed out at some people who have surrounded themselves around the President and think that they know best and that no other person knows anything Asked if it was politic for the former President to keep on attacking the NDC government even when the effect could be that Atta Mills would serve for only one term, he said that there was a need to set out early warning signals. “Of course, and that is why we must create awareness as early as possible that the way we are going, we must not assume that governance is all about economic issues. It is not everybody who is looking for bread and butter, and if we tend to assume that governance is only about the economy we may be wrong. It is also about dealing with other social issues, including investigating, arresting and prosecuting where necessary,” he said, adding that Rawlings was fully aware of the effect of his pronouncements.