Power is opium – Abass Fuseini Sbaabe writes

Many people have learned great lessons in recent times: Members of the NPP who just lost power and NDC members who just won power are both learning. These events come with different lessons about human nature. Funny enough it looks like both the NDC and NPP are learning differently. Whiles the NPP is learning, the NDC is unlearning and that is also learning!

The NPP members who once avoided calls under the pretext of being busy have now realized that the noise from the grassroots, once dismissed as cacophony, now has a melodious side.

The traffic of calls used to make them feel important, but today, nobody even ‘flashes’ them! The absence of these calls in recent times has starkly highlighted their newfound irrelevance.

When an old person is being buried, another old person observing must get worried because it will one day be their turn. Yet, a politician hardly learns from the downfall of their opponent until it is their turn to fall again.

NDC is lucky. It is in power today but unfortunately, some of those who have been elevated have suddenly found their colleagues to be a nuisance and are avoiding calls and messages. They are now oblivious of the reasons that caused our painful exit in 2016.

I have gained and lost power with NDC before, and I know how it feels when power slips from your fingers—a year becomes like an hour, and a four-year stay in office appears like four hours. You begin to wonder what you used the days for. You wonder why you didnt use even your sleeping moments to reach out to people, respond to calls and messages to make your comrades feel important.

Your four-year stay in office will just play out before you in less than no time. When power gets drained from you, like NPP is experiencing today, you will say ‘hi’ to people who are ignorant about your presence. Power, they say, is ephemeral.

As I write, members of the NPP are everywhere recounting the reasons for their defeat. Did they not realize they would one day become irrelevant when the transient and elusive power eluded them?

When the NDC lost power in 2000, we learned a lot about what caused our defeat. When the NPP lost in 2008, they recounted to the world what caused their defeat. When we lost in 2016, we documented the reasons for our defeat. Now, as the NPP lost in 2024, they are singing the reasons for their defeat like canary birds.

So I ask, how come the NDC didn’t learn the lessons offered by our defeats in 2000? And to the NPP, I ask: how come your defeat in 2008 didn’t teach you any lessons after winning power?

Now the NPP is promising itself that it will learn what caused its political defeat and make amends. The NDC is fortunate. It is in office today and has the lessons of 2000 and 2016 to guide it. But will we learn? I mean, are we learning? Are we doing enough to avoid the pitfalls that accelerated our political defeats in 2000 and 2016?

It is too early to conclude whether the NDC is learning or not, but I am inclined to believe that power itself is like a spirit that determines how those who wield it must behave. It is like opium that tends to take over our true nature and “bless” us with its own nature. It is only after one loses it that the scales fall off our eyes, and we regain our true nature, as the NPP is experiencing now. Power makes those who wield it stiff-necked and inebriated.

We pray that those who are now being overpowered by the spirit of power be released in God’s name and that the NDC today should be a party that has learned lessons about how we stumbled politically and how to avoid the stumps today.

Comrade Abass Fuseini Sbaabe
(Insights from Inside)