Angry NDC serial callers accuse President Mahama of taking over their job

President John Mahama

The National Association of NDC Serial Callers has expressed its anger over what it says are attempts by President John Dramani Mahama to render them jobless.

The group says President Mahama’s comments at the rally yesterday are reserved for serial callers according to the communication structures of the NDC and the party’s plans ahead of the 2016 elections.

“Per the agreement, we are all to stay within our limits,” the association said in a strictly confidential and strongly-worded letter addressed to the Chairman of the Party, Mr. Kofi Poturphy. “We agreed that only campaign messages that are enlightened and can be backed by facts or those that appeal to common sense should be uttered by our Presidential Candidate, who is also the President of the Republic and Commander-In-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces. Yesterday, however, the president decided to stray from his arena, bypassed the categories of messages meant to be uttered by Ministers, MPs, Party Communicators and constituency executive and descended to our level,” the letter said.

“We see this as a subtle attempt to render us jobless because if the president is doing our job so well, there will not be the need for us ahead of the elections. But we want to state unequivocally that we will resist any such attempts because we still think we could have said what the president said in a more polished manner even at our level. If nobody listens to us and the President continuous the way he is going, we will cross carpets to the NPP and you know the deadly ammunition of information in our possession and what we can do with it,” the group warns.

Political serial callers are often said to be at the lowest step of the ladder of political logic in Ghana. They are a group of people who are often hired and paid by their party members to insult, vilify and make merry of their political opponents’ misfortunes and tragedies. Their arguments and contributions are often illogical and lack intellectual depth, but they are generally tolerated by radio and television show hosts and audience because Ghanaians have come to attach very little or no seriousness to what they say. For instance, they make spurious allegations and infantile comments and get away with them but the same comments can land a reasonable contributor in legal trouble.

The NDC serial callers’ reaction comes in the wake of President John Mahama’s speech at the party’s Greater Accra Regional rally in the President’s ongoing #ChangingLives tour of the regions.

President Mahama became President after President John Evans Atta-Mills died in July 2012, with barely four months to the crucial 2012 Presidential elections in Ghana. As the Vice President who was sworn in as President after the death of his boss, President Mahama decided to embark on a “thank-you tour” of all the regions of the country after the state burial of his former boss. It was a campaign tour disguised in funeral cloth even before his party nominated him to lead them in the 2012 elections. Riding on the sympathy resulting from President Mills’ demise and his own likeable personality, Mr. John Mahama snatched victory from the NPP’s Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who had been desperately campaigning for the presidency since 2007.

President Mahama’s administration has been rocked by corruption scandals such as the Subah, GYEEDA and SADA among others. His corruption-friendly posture towards these scandals has resulted in very little or no action against the perpetrators. He doesn’t seem to have any clue how to permanently end the power crises he promised to end in the first year of his government.

President Mahama takes his campaign to the Upper West Region. In order to show how “modest” he is, the president entered Wa in a tricycle.

Mahama’s administration has virtually handed over the management of the economy to the IMF and the confusion in the economic management (or rather mismanagement) was obvious when the Finance Minister, in his budget last week, enumerated the importance of allowing basic school candidates to re-sit their final exams without saying anything about the cost or how that affects the budge. That was only an aspect of the state of the nation address, which the Finance Minister called the budget. This and other unfulfilled promises have attracted the president to a barrage of criticisms, with his opponents calling him incompetent.

Yesterday, however, President John Mahama sought to reply his critics. He did not focus on how to solve these challenges but decided to descend into the stinking trenches to talk about the opposition party’s recent tragedies. The President, among others, made mockery of the killing of the NPP’s Upper East Regional Chairman in what he referred to as “acid bath.” He also spoke about the recent stabbing of an NPP supporter in the Ashanti Region teasingly and said if Ghanaians voted for the NPP, they would do same to Ghanaians.

“Where we feel the Presidency stooped even lower than we would have done was when he said it is only former President’s Kufuor and Rawlings who are qualified to question his competence because they have been presidents and know how it is to occupy that office,” the NDC serial callers said in their letter, which was intercepted by manassehazure.com before the party chairman got his copy.

“We would have handled this more tactfully and sensibly because, though we all have not been presidents, we don’t need a spiritual eye to determine who a competent president is and who is not. We know His Excellency President Mahama is the most incompetent president we have ever had and we say it among ourselves. Our job, however, is to point to the few infrastructure which any idiot can borrow money and build anyway, and keep highlighting them in our propaganda messages as we have been doing. We, therefore, advise the President not to make our work any more difficult,” the group said.

The serial callers called on the national executive of the NDC to call the President to order and remind him that everybody must operate within their realm. They also want ministers and MPs to leave what they call the “bugabuga communication tactics” to the serial callers and respect their contribution.

“They should allow us to test the waters with such unguarded utterances because no serious person will ever quote us. We deserve respect because we are an important group in the party and we won’t sit down for the President or anybody to undermine our role. If anybody thinks our job is that easy, when Joy FM announces the phone lines, they should try calling and see what it takes to get your call through,” the letter said.

The NDC serial callers also said they were appalled to hear the President glorify another a serial caller from the the opposition NPP on a campaign platform.

“For the president to have talked about Auntie B’s audio forwarded to him on WhatsApp leaves us wondering whether he is the communication guru he claims to be. “We serial callers listen to the shows before we call in. We hear the concerns of people, which are sometimes our problems too. But we have to do our work so we close our eyes and defend him. He should not take Ghanaians for granted because we know what it means to be in opposition,” the letter ends.

Editor’s note: This is a satirical piece.