'Democracy does not follow common sense' - Kufuor speaks on NPP's 2008 defeat

Former President John Agyekum Kufuor has opened up on the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) defeat in 2008 to the National Democratic Congress.

The former president said, the NPP’s defeat was mysterious and defied logic, because they had performed considerably well in power.

“It is a mystery. Let me start off with an observation with all respects, democracy is not rationality, common sense or mathematics”, former President Kufuor noted in an interview on Asaase Radio as quoted by ‘theghanareport”

He argued that, if politics followed common sense, the NPP would have won the elections at the first instance, pointing to the fact that the NPP won the first round of the 2008 elections, except, the party did not cross the 50 plus 1 vote to carry the day.

“So, that common sense, if democracy were that, it should have been a walk over for my party,” he added.

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He however pointed at some factors, which he believed may have contributed to the party’s loss.

On Kufour’s list was the death of the then Finance Minister Baah Wiredu, and the scourge of a global economic recession on the country.

“When our Minister of Finance died, it hit me, I don’t know if it was an act of God but then the financial crunch was coming, payment of school teachers got delayed.

He also blamed the NPP defeat on party faithful threatening to take Ghana’s Electoral Commission to court.

“Our own members had also threatened to take the Electoral Commission to court to restrain it from holding the elections till the wrongs we saw in the second round were corrected.

“Seeing people being beaten up. I don’t want to mention the constituencies and it was only just about 10 days to January 7 where I had to sign off power.

“Well, the court didn’t rule for us but meanwhile the outstanding elections was taking place, they (party faithfuls) boycotted it so that is how power slipped from us,” he explained.

The former president is convinced it was not an outright rejection from the people.

“So, many things and with the opposition on our necks but even with all these things, if you could remember in the first round, we had 49% so it should have been a done deal,” he recounted.

That was not enough, the party needed just over 2% votes more to crossover to emerge victorious, but that did not happen and the elections had to go into a second round and eventually a third round before the then NDC candidate had to be declared a winner.

His gut feeling, according to the former President, was that Ghanaians were going to reward his party with another victory in 2008 because of the numerous infrastructure projects including the building the Bui dam, and pulling the economy from the Highly Indepted and Poor Countries (HIPC) to a high flying economy among many other initiatives.

Alas, he said that was not to be and stated “that is why l say democracy is not common sense.”