As the controversy surrounding the implosive book ‘Working with Rawlings’, authored by Professor Kwamena Ahwoi, deepens, the founder of NDC, former President Jerry John Rawlings, has dropped a thunderbolt, suggesting the real agenda behind the release of the book.
According to the former President, while one of the agenda of the book is to ‘knock him (Rawlings) down’ to pre-empt the exposure he is about to give about people like Professor Awhoi, the main rationale behind the book is for Mr Ahwoi and his cronies within the party to push the NDC down a precipice in the forthcoming 2020 general elections as a way of holding on to their stakes in the party.
Mahama’s failure
Mr Rawlings also suggests that Professor Ahwoi’s intention for the release of the book at this time is also an attempt to negatively affect the chances of the party in the 2020 general election, and thus give him and his cronies the opportunity to set aside the current flagbearer, John Dramani Mahama, and his running mate, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, for their preferred choice for the 2024 general election.
“The cunning calculation is that Mahama and his running mate will step aside after 2020 while they consolidate their control over the party and provide their own flag-bearer and running mate for 2024,” he added.
Ill-timed
Some members of the opposition party have suggested that the release of the book is ill-timed, with a huge potential of negatively affecting the fortunes of the party in this year’s general election.
The Chairman of the Volta Regional Council of Elders of the party, Dan Abodakpi, has described the content of the book as an attempt to discredit the political legacy of former President Rawlings.
“I have read some excerpts of the book and I am convinced that this is a perilous, ill-timed submission at this point in our party’s history. It is in fact, in several instances, a factually wrong and dangerous aberration likely to create tensions in and out. Is the objective of this enterprise to destroy President Rawlings’ political legacy? If so, then I can tell my brother and my friend that he is simply wasting his time,” he said.
However, according to Mr Rawlings, the timing in the mind of Professor Ahwoi was well-calculated, in that it gives him an opportunity to try to pre-empt the exposure he(Rawlings) is about to reveal in a book he was working on.
“There is nothing ill-timed about Kwamena Ahwoi serving dankwasere soup at this time. He needed to knock down Rawlings to pre-empt the exposure that Rawlings’s book, ‘The Triumph of Evil’, promises to reveal about some of them,” the former President stated in a twitter post.
He added: “People like him do not expect the NPP to let go of 2020, so they are hoping to utilise the opportunity of a loss to do damage with some vicious, manufactured stuff”.
