The 2020 flagbearer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Dramani Mahama, says the party has discovered that the deployment of ‘Illiterate’ agents to some polling stations negatively accounted to his defeat in the 2020 polls.
Mr. Mahama made this revelation at the annual conference of NDC professional forum on Thursday April 29, 2021.
The former president who is seeking to lead the main opposition NDC for the 2024 election has been blowing hot and cold over why he lost the 2020 elections, the second defeat in four years.
At a point, he blamed the Electoral Commission (EC) for organizing a rigged election while in some instances he claimed the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) bought the election with state resources.
In rather a new twist, Mr Mahama is of strong believed that his party agents were illiterate leading to their inability to tabulate the votes at the polling stations.
According to Mr. Mahama, this development came to bare after some regional chairmen submitted their 2020 general election reports to the party at recent retreat in the Volta region.
“Every region was asked to account for its performance in the 2020 elections. They came with reports, you should have listened to some of the regional reports. There was one region I will not mention which region it was they said oh, some of our party agents were illiterate they couldn’t read or write. And the Chairman asked but who appointed them, who made them party agents?
“So it’s obvious that they themselves have started doing the review of what went right or what went wrong, what they did well leading to a positive outcome in the region and what they could have done better which led to a negative outcome,” former President Mahama indicated.
He therefore called on the NDC professionals to contest for the electoral officers’ role during elections, which he believes could be of a great service to the party.
“If you have the qualification to be an electoral officer, apply for the position. Our NPP opponent have taken advantage of that, so you find that when EC advertises, many of the NPP supporters do apply and you know what kind of advantage they can give them,” he tells the NDC group.
