The Editor-in-chief of The Enquirer newspaper, Mr Raymond Archer, has said that if he were a member of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and former president Rawlings talked him down, he would talk back or resign from the party.
He said former president Rawlings cannot continue to talk to members of his party as if they were brainless people adding that “I won’t belong to a party where somebody gets up and without respect to anybody can insult you, disrespect you.”
Mr Archer was contributing to a discussion on Mr Rawlings’ recent vituperative – but not entirely new – attacks on president JEA Mills and some members of his government in Joy FM’s news analysis programme, Newsfile, hosted by Emmanuel Kofi Ansah.
“I said it the other day, the people he surrounded himself with, most of them have worked with me before. That’s when I said who born dog. In my time, none of them would dare do the foolish things (they are doing) around him. I’m disciplined and I know Prof is a disciplined man, but why is he not putting his foot down to make sure the nonsense going on around him is brought to a halt? If I could do it why can’t he do it? If he can do that, we will begin to see some change and if they are not changing, he should boot them out. If not, if not, he will go down with them. And if they want to take us with them, I’m afraid we will not go down with them,” the former president said.
But Mr Archer was unimpressed by Mr Rawlings’ comments.
“What is it about former president Rawlings that he thinks he is smarter than everybody in this country…what is the rationale for comparing yourself to President Mills that you did better,?” he asked.
He accused the former president of exhibiting double standards in that while Mr Rawlings, as president, was upset when Prof. Adu Boahene named his dog Rawlings, “now he” Mr Rawlings “is calling people ‘who born dog’”.
“You remember those days people used to call him ‘dzimapkla’ because they said his father was an Irish and ‘dzimapkla’ in Ewe is a bastard, you heard him, he called people ‘greedy bastards,’ so that is the double standards that I cannot take, ”’ Mr Archer noted.
Touching on Mr Rawlings’ criticism that President Mills had allowed a sustained indiscipline to permeate his government, Raymond Archer said aspects of the former president’s so-called discipline were so abysmal he never wishes the country to go back to that.
"Double Standards"
“Look, Rawlings talks about the fact that he used to discipline people, we all know his track record about what constituted discipline, we know, and if I were Rawlings I won’t be bringing back (those) 19 years (of leadership),…there are things that he did that nobody including myself will never support, absolutely…his sense of discipline we know, especially the reference point is Ackah, his own vice-president. And I don’t think that after all these years of our maturity in democracy, we still want that sense of discipline, let alone the reference to it or the recommendation that that could be a reference point of behaviour for a sitting president. I don’t think that we should allow our president – even though I know he won’t do a thing like that – to begin to box people in cabinet as a way of expressing his disapproval of their conduct,” Raymond Archer lectured.
He said such a reference as suggested by Mr. Rawlings was not a credible one.
For him, it was increasingly worrying that whenever the Rawlingses failed to get their way, they will rather choose to spoil the party.
He warned the former president to desist from entertaining any ideas that he can make some particular persons president because those people – he won’t mention names – can never be president of Ghana.
Source: Myjoyonline.com
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