The political journey of young politicians must be smoothly undertaken devoid of unnecessary creation of enemies
I have come to understand politics from a different perspective in the last couple of months after sixteen (16) uninterrupted years.
Starting as a member of Tescon, Electoral Area Coordinator, Constituency Communication team member and finally to Constituency Communications officer for three consecutive terms. I have learnt a lot and gathered much experience that I believe it's worthy of sharing with the young politicians.
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As young politicians, we mostly join politics through the mentorship of people we admire who wholeheartedly accept us, put us under their tutelage with the aim of helping us to grow in the game and at the same time getting our services to also ensure their existence in the game to achieve their short and long term objectives.
We become so much attached to our mentors, those we call our God fathers and we ensure we serve their interest as we also expect them to create opportunities for us and give us the needed exposure so that we can one day become like them or achieve our long term desire of becoming useful to our country and for our personal development.
These interests binds us together to ensure that we team up strongly together against others, those we call our political opponents to either wrestle power from them or ensure that they are unable to take power from us.
In serving our masters, we often assume the role of a lioness who jealously becomes over protective of her cubs. We ensure that no body touches them and go scot free. We unleash every weapon at our disposal to attack irrespective of the consequences.
When we are overly consumed by our desire to protect we begin to step on toes, we are mostly careless of the repercussions of our actions. In fact, we may not even recognise that such actions has its future implications.
As we move on we begin to realise that political interests rotate, it's mostly temporal and the toes we step on moves towards our direction. Sometimes there is no space for us to avoid those toes. The very people you offended because they were not on your side unconsciously begin to tilt towards your side because a new political interest which you never envisaged begins to draw us closer to the opponents. Sometimes we feel uncomfortable but the situation wouldn't allow us to avoid them. Guilt, uncertainty of acceptance without malice unnecessarily burdens our heart especially when it's the case of you being used and dumped by your previous masters.
The internal elections especially from Regional elections, National elections and moving towards the process to elect presidential candidate has been a short journey but packed with a lot of lessons and it's a perfect example of my understanding that political interests rotates and the rotation brings former opponents together.
To avoid these unnecessary pressures, one must always approach politics as a friendly adventure, hold strongly to what you believe in but make space to accommodate opponents. Deliberately position yourself against anything that would push you to unnecessarily step on toes and when you do be humble enough to apologize. This way, you would always serve your masters without creating enemies for yourself because you don't really know what the future will be. Doing this opens wider and unlimited opportunities for you rather than limiting you to a situation that would even be suicidal for you when you are dumped by those you serve.
In politics, there is no permanent enemies, let's try and even avoid the temporal enemies. We must learn as we move on.
Let's remain committed to our God fathers especially when their actions proves that they aren't selfish but let's do so with the caution not to needlessly create enemies for ourselves.
My advice to young politicians.
Part 1.
Adams Yusif
(0240857941)
Communications officer, Asante Akim South NPP