The Deputy General Secretary of the NDC, Mustapha Gbande, has revealed that elements within the New Patriotic Party quietly backed the NDC’s push to return to power.
Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express on December 10, the Deputy Director of Operations at the Presidency said the support was real, deliberate, and driven by concern for the country.
According to him, the NDC’s comeback was rooted in lessons from the past.
“We realised that in 2016, Ghanaians made a mistake. The NDC made a mistake by not standing by President John Mahama to deliver on his vision for this country,” he said.
He noted that Mahama’s exit created a void.
“Because really, after his exit, we saw the vacuum, we saw the gap, and unfortunately for us as a country, to the extent that we couldn’t continue a good project, a good policies of John Mahama, be it roads, hospital projects or school projects, we abandoned all of these things, and so there was a need to come back and to have all of these things delivered.”
But the return to power, he stressed, was not achieved by the NDC alone. It was a wide coalition.
“Now we owe it to the civil society, the media, who stood also for what is right, not what is political, but what is nationalistic, the rank and file of our party, who rallied in the belief that we’re leading them to victory, they came on board. Everybody came on board,” he said.
Then came the revelation. Gbande stated that even people in the governing party joined their cause.
“And we had to achieve this aim, including even elements within the NPP who stood for the right reasons, the right things. I mean, and I will say it frankly, we had enormous support from within the NPP, persons who believe that really that was not the NPP they knew.”
Host Evans Mensah pushed for specifics. “When you say support, in what ways? Specifically?” he asked.
Mr Gbande insisted the help came in many forms. “Varied ways, people who stood for the country, people who just realised that no, enough was enough,” he said.
The host pressed again. “The people who were campaigning for you, supporting you financially, in what ways?”
Mr Gbande declined to go into detail.
“Many ways, politically, that is how I would keep it. I’m saying that we’ve had a lot of support from even the NPP base itself, who believe that it was just a matter of time before President Akufo-Addo would have supervised the collapse of a country called Ghana, and they couldn’t have allowed that to happen. And so we won by a large margin,” he said.
The host suggested that their victory was therefore more about NPP’s weaknesses than NDC’s strengths.
“You saying that you won not because you were superior, but because the NPP was a weakened party, and because of his own misgovernance,” Evans asked.
Mr Gbande disagreed. “We didn’t win on that route; we won because our party became a strong party. The executives were competent. They were up to the task, from our national chairman to the last person was ready to work as a team,” he said.
He credited the leadership of the party. “We had a very good flag bearer who is credible, who has a vision, and we all can see that vision.
“We had a running mate who changed the narrative of our politics, our geopolitics, as a first female presidential hopeful at that time. Today, she is Vice President. So all of these were indicators why we won.”