It is a common phenomenon in Ghana’s political arena to see members of a political party support their leaders even if they know they (leaders) are wrong, while demonizing those who are bold enough to call them out.
A member of the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) communication team, Padmore Baffour Agyapong has however urged the party’s loyalists to criticize the government if need be, rather than be “praise singers.”
He believes the praise singing attitude of NPP communicators can cause the party to lose the goodwill of Ghanaians. “We need to speak against the ills of the party, especially if it is coming from leadership. We can’t all support the president when he does something wrong. It won’t be good for us if a minister, the party secretary or chair faults and we don’t speak against it.
We’ve simply signed our death warrant if we let that happen and as a party we may fall into a ditch and may not recover from it. We should be bold enough to criticize ourselves as that is the only way we can grow,” he charged.
To him, politics is more than praise singing as he believes leaders are destroyed if they are not criticized constructively. “Anyone who tells the leader the truth is doing him a favor and any good leader will prefer an honest person to a praise singer. A leader who doesn’t take criticism will never grow and that means you are accepting failure.”
Citing an instance in which some party leaders needed to be criticized for the good of the party, he shared, “The Minister for Roads in August told us a road fund board had been established to see to the payment of road contractors after the gov’t released 800million. In September the contractors were told to go back to work within two weeks before receiving their monies but we’re now in October and they’ve not received any payment. We can’t be silent over such an issue, we need to talk about it and make the president aware of happenings.”
In an interview with Don Kwabena Prah on Happy98.9FM’s Epa Hoa Daben political talk show, Padmore Agyapong noted that such instances does not make the party look good and “we shouldn’t wait for it to be used against us during elections. We need to address it now.”
According to him, the opposition would not have suffered an easy defeat in the 2016 elections if they had paid attention to criticism and not basked in the funfair.