President John Mahama has decided to maintain Vice-President Kwesi Amissah Arthur as his running mate for the 2016 elections, according to Class News sources at the party's ongoing National Executive Committee meeting on Monday November 7.
The decision follows intense internal jostling by various groups for their preferred candidates to be chosen by the President. The lobbying started after the NDC gave the President a December 31 ultimatum to name his running mate.
Amidst the jostling, pollster Ben Ephson warned that President Mahama will lose the 2016 presidential election if he fails to retain Mr Amissah-Arthur as running mate.
“If President Mahama changes Mr Amissah-Arthur, he is heading for defeat,” the Managing Editor of the Daily Dispatch newspaper said in an interview.
“You don’t change a winning team,” he warned, adding: “…Even [Nana] Akufo-Addo [flagbearer of the biggest opposition party] is retaining [Dr Mahamudu] Bawumia… So, why do you change a winning team?” Mr Ephson asked.
Mr Ephson’s warning came on the heels of calls by a group calling itself Volta Youth for Development, for President Mahama to replace the Vice-President with Speaker of Parliament Edward Doe Adjaho. The group argued that Mr Amissah-Arthur is “incompetent”.
Its leader, Prosper Fofo Ndekor said that President Mahama and the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) risked losing the 2016 general elections if the former governor of the central bank was retained as running mate.
In the group’s estimation, the loyalty of the Volta Region to the NDC over the years must be rewarded with the selection of Mr Adjaho as running mate.
To buttress the group’s incompetence charge against Mr Amissah-Arthur, Mr Fofo Ndekor asked: “How many times do we hear of the activeness of the Vice President?”
He also cited a situation a few months ago, where Foreign Affairs Minister Hanna Tetteh represented the president at a forum held in Accra instead of the vice-president doing so, a situation which forced former President Jerry Rawlings to raise a protest.
“It’s a clear indication that even the president knows his vice-president is incompetent,” Mr Fofo Ndekor said.
Also, a senior official at development NGO ISODEC, Dr Steve Manteaw, said the fact that the country is facing economic challenges does not suggest Vice-President Amissah-Arthur is a poor performer, because the country's problems are not his creation.
Dr Manteaw said the country's challenges came about largely because of the over-expenditure that characterised the 2012 campaign.
The vice-president, according to Dr Manteaw, is doing his best as the head of the economic management team, with the Finance Ministry, to see how the country can get out of the doldrums. Therefore, it will be wrong, he said, for anybody to judge him on the basis of the economic challenges and the fact that he is not visible in the country.
Dr Manteaw made these observations in an interview with Class91.3fm's Regina Borley-Bortey on whether or not President Mahama should repeat Mr Amissah-Arthur as his running mate.
"The general expectation has been that you must be charismatic, you must be seen or judged as actually delivering or performing your role, but for those who understand what the role of the Vice-President is, you will appreciate that the fact that Mr Amissah-Arthur is not visible does not in itself suggest he is not performing," Dr Manteaw stressed.
According to him, Mr Amissah-Arthur is a technical person and that it has been a tradition for some time now for presidential candidates to look for a technocrat to give them that technical backing because the vice-president heads the Economic Management Team. "So, you need someone who understands a bit of economics," he added.
In his view, similar considerations informed the selection of Dr Mahamadu Bawumia as running mate for Nana Akufo-Addo, flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
Dr Manteaw observed that people like Dr Bawumia and Mr Amissah-Arthur are technocrats who make things happen in the background.
In his words: "You don’t expect a Vice-President to overshadow the president and to be seen in the limelight most of the time and that is the reason why Amissah-Arthur does not look like the shining star."
In response to whether the Vice-President should be retained by the President, Dr Manteaw asked: "Who changes a winning team?"
"Two of them went for the contest in 2012 and won, and, so, I don’t expect President Mahama to a make a change. You don’t fix it when it’s not broken, so, my expectation is that President Mahama will maintain his running mate," he added.
Source: myghanaonline.com
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