A member of the National Democratic Congress’ (NDC) legal team says his party’s campaign did not effectively counter the argument that they had been in office for eight years. 

Abraham Amaliba says the NDC campaign team knowing that it was President Mahama’s first term allowed talks of the party being in power for eight years take centre stage in public discourse.

A lot of postmortems has been carried out on various platforms for the contributory reasons for the cause of the NDC’s electoral defeat in last week’s polls.

Speaking on Joy FM/JOYNEWS' news analysis program Newsfile Saturday, Mr Amaliba dismissed claims by some party members that campaign funds did not get to those who needed to campaign.

 "The subculture of eight years for every government which has sunk into the minds of Ghanaians we had a dilemma, we had a difficult task to try and separate four years of President John Mahama with the eight years of the NDC government.

"Try as we did, the opposition kept hammering on it is eight years and we did not forcefully put that out. Two ideas were competing; four years, eight years and it appears the eight years won the day," he said.

According to him, as a party, in accessing their loss, they must go beyond the party executives to interact with the ordinary party supporters at the grassroots level to get the real reasons why the NDC lost. 

"To limit it to the just regional executives and constituency executives...I think these are people who are part of the problem where we find ourselves," he added. 

But legal practitioner Ace Annan Ankomah attributes the NDC's defeat to nonchalant attitude to corruption scandals and social media.

He said although the NDC people were active on social media, "it was as if the NDC people on social media were robots. Sometimes they were given the same text and they posted them almost like robots. They sounded too pro artificial, too plastic."

"The NDC has an ad that said 'time aso' [it's time]. I think it was meaningful because the history of the fourth republic is eight years guys," he said adding they party should have done something beyond ordinary for Ghanaians to give them another four years. 

He thought it was wrong for the party to fiddle with the calendar to explain to Ghanaians how long President Mahama has been at the helm of affairs. 

The law lecturer said the outgoing government's inability to deal with the corruption issues under their watch caused them the 2016 election citing the Bus branding contract which was reported to have been given the green light in consultation with the office of the president. 

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