Broadcast journalist and host of Good Evening Ghana Paul Adom-Otchere has said the 35th anniversary of the 31 December revolution marked at the Revolutionary Square in Accra on Saturday served as a platform for Goozie Tanoh, a member of the National Democratic Congress, to subtly revive his presidential ambition.
Former President J. J Rawlings, who led the revolution, was accompanied to mark the occasion by Mr Tanoh, who broke away from the NDC before the 2000 elections to form the National Reform Party (NRP), having been overlooked for the late John Atta Mills as running mate to Mr Rawlings in 1996.
Mr Rawlings, addressing the gathering on Saturday 31 December, hinted at restoring the moral image of the NDC.
Speaking on Joy FM after the event, Mr Adom-Otchere said the exercise was a bid to re-launch the presidential bid of Mr Tanoh.
“This is the re-launch of Goozie Tanoh’s presidential ambition; that’s what truly happened,” he stated.
Explaining his stance, Mr Adom-Otchere said: “Goozie Tanoh has been primed for the presidency within the workings of the cadre movement of the PNDC and NDC for a long time. The Professor Mills interruption and interference is what got Goosie off the path of inheriting the Rawlings whole political platform, and out of the Professor Mills interruption, President Mahama also emerged. And so Goosie had always been on the sidelines.
In fact he returned in 2008 to help Professor Mills win, but has really been on the sidelines and I get the sense that he had been looking for the opportunity because he, all the time, had carried this narrative of probity and accountability and had become the hero of the cadres who actually built PNDC and NDC and the so called time tested values they have been talking about.
So what I take out now really is that this certainly is a re-launch of Goosie Tanoh’s political and presidential ambition.”
Mr Tanoh was a founding member of the NDC. He served as the Executive Director of Finance and Administration of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation from 1989 to 1992. He was also a lecturer of law at the University of Ghana and board member of Ecobank.
He served in the Consultative Assembly which wrote Ghana’s 1992 constitution, as a representative of the grassroots-based Committee for the Defence of the Revolution. He was formerly Attorney-General in the Provisional National Defence Council junta led Mr Rawlings, and served as a member of Ghana’s diplomatic delegation to the UN from 1986 to 1989.
He formed the NRP and contested in the 2000 presidential election, where he garnered 1.1 per cent of the national vote.
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