The former president J.J. Rawlings says the National Democratic Congress (NDC) which he founded in 1992 abandoned its moral framework and taken what it was not known for.

Mr Rawlings in an interview with Kwaku Sakyi-Addo on Asaase Radio said the party on whose ticket he served as president for eight years followed the J.A. Kufuor’s NPP down the path to “monetisation”.

According to him, both the Prof Mills and Mahama leadership did little to change that as some of the people who got to lead the party were weak.

“Plus, I think they may have decided that if they can’t go along with my kind of neat, clean politics…they would like to do it the Kufuor and his NPP way: monetise it.

“So, naturally, he would have to leave Kufuor and all his sins alone and engage in the same type of politics, monetising the whole programme, the whole process. That is why corruption has gone so deep … since I left office,” he said.

Mr Rawlings said cited the late former president John Atta Mills' failure to investigate rots under the Kufuor administration which reigned from 2001 and 2009 that led to the decline in moral standards he set.

He said Prof Mills’ failure to clampdown on rottenness and probe what he described as “atrocities” and “murderous things we knew about” sent the NDC descending down the stairs of its founding tenets.

“He was unwilling to touch any of those things,” the former president Rawlings said of his former vice-president.

“It’s as if he doesn’t understand basic psychology, about right and wrongs. In his refusal to halt, to investigate…and to clean up some of those wrongs, some of those injustices, the wrong would end up perpetuating itself.

“That’s how come we went downhill…How can you hate people in their brilliance to the extent that you would want to jail people like Tsatsu Tsikata?

“But you’ve got to understand the nature of capitalists: how cruel, how vicious they can be. I’m not too sure socialists go that far,” Mr Rawlings said.