A founding member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Kofi Totobi Quakyi, has warned against regarding the party as a vehicle for personal and selfish aggrandisement.

"Our party was not founded as a vehicle for personal aggrandisement but on the principles that welcome selflessness and service to the people", he stressed.

Speaking on the topic — From Revolution to Fourth Republic, the Rawlings Legacy, at the ceremony to honour the founder of the party, President Jerry John Rawlings, Mr Totobi Quakyi said the NDC was not founded for opportunists, political mercenaries, contractors of convenience or persons whose only ideology is personal profit. It was founded as a movement of purpose.

Mr Totobi Quakyi, who served as the first National Security Coordinator in the Rawlings' regime, said it was wrong for anybody to invoke Rawlings in song, in cloth, in portrait and in slogan, while quietly departing from the values that made his name endure.

The life of Jerry Rawlings, he said, could not be reduced to a few remarks, stressing that the revolution he came to embody could not be reduced to nostalgia.

Equally, he emphasised, the legacy he left behind could not be honoured merely through praise-singing. "It must be examined. It must be protected. Above all, it must be lived.”

"The theme before us — from Revolution to the Fourth Republic — should, he said, not be treated as a historical journey to be recounted and that it must be received as an invitation to honest examination", he added. 

“Socrates warned that the unexamined life is not worth living. For political movements too, the unexamined legacy is not worth celebrating,” he said.

Mr Totobi Quakyi said the time must examine not only the means by which change was pursued in the 19 years of the PNDC/NDC, but also the ends for which sacrifices were made.

“For, in the final analysis, it is the nobility of the ends — justice, probity, accountability, dignity for the ordinary Ghanaian, and democratic stability — that gives moral meaning to the struggles that came before.

“Those of us who lived through the turbulence of those years know what the revolution demanded.

It demanded courage. It demanded a willingness to confront moral decay, arrogance, impunity and the dangerous belief that public office was the private property of a privileged few,” he said.

Over the years

He said it must not go unnoticed that not every action of those years was perfect. No honest participant in that history can make such a claim.

“But the essential lesson of the revolution was clear: that Ghana must belong to the many, not the few; that public service must be anchored in discipline, that leadership must be accountable and that the ordinary Ghanaian must never again be treated as a spectator in his own country.”

The sacrifices of the revolution, he said, brought a renewed national consciousness, which brought about the insistence that power must answer to the people, stressing that "They bought us the foundations upon which the Fourth Republic was eventually built".

He said, “perhaps most significantly, they gave us the example of the year 2000 — when President Rawlings, after long years at the helm, accepted the verdict of the people and helped set the heart of the nation at ease through a peaceful transfer of power.  

Even after the electorate delivered a clear verdict on the previous administration, he said it should concern all “that there are still Ghanaians who wonder whether we truly represent a different standard of public service.”

The questions

These questions, Mr Totobi Quakyi said, must disturb every true cadre, every party elder, every minister, every appointee, every constituency executive and every young person who carries the NDC card with pride.

“Because the danger before us is not that we might lose an election.

Parties win and lose.

That is the nature of democracy.

The greater danger is that we may help convince the Ghanaian people that the two dominant parties are, in the end, the same,” he said.

As a country and members of the party, “we must remember that when citizens conclude that all parties are alike, they do not merely reject politicians.

They begin to reject the democratic system itself.