Former Attorney General Dr Obed Asamoah has said his relationship with his friend, former president Jerry John Rawlings, became strained as a result of Mr Rawlings’ continuous desire to have control over the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
Mr Rawlings a founding father of the NDC has been widely criticised by some members of the party for being too “controlling”.
But Mr Rawlings however argues that members of the party have deviated from the principles of probity and accountability underpinning the formation of the NDC.
Dr Asamoah, who served as the Foreign Minister and later Attorney General and Minister of Justice under President Rawlings, speaking in an interview with Starr FM said: “Rawlings always wanted to have a measure of control of the party (NDC) and that is where he and I had our problems in the past because you remember the Swedru declaration, he went there and proposed president Mills as his successor without consulting any of us and I believe he did that because he thought he could manipulate president Mills and subsequent event showed that because when president Mills couldn’t be manipulated, he fell out with him even though he was his darling boy.
“So he’s always wanted to control the party, he thinks that the party was set up by him even though he was not the only one who set it up and in fact it was set up contrary to his real wishes. He’s always had his misgivings about multi-party democracy but he was forced to this line by the other colleagues in the PNDC who thought that ultimately we had to go that way. So he’s always had the idea to want to control and I think you have to live with that.”
The former NDC National Chairman left the party to form the now defunct Democratic Freedom Party (DFP) in 2006 and returned to the NDC in 2011.
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