The General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Fifi Fiavi Kwetey, used a prime-time television appearance this week to deliver a message that was as much a warning to his own party as it was a political statement, telling delegates and leaders that the reset the NDC promised Ghanaians cannot happen if the party itself refuses to change first.
Speaking on PM Express on Joy News on Tuesday, February 17, Kwetey said the NDC cannot promise national transformation while maintaining practices it criticises in others. His argument was direct and personal. He stressed that the NDC cannot build public trust by attacking only the governing New Patriotic Party while failing to hold itself to higher standards, saying you cannot attack your opponent when you were doing exactly the same thing. That hypocrisy, he said, is not something to encourage.
What made the remarks unusual was not the content but the stakes Kwetey attached to them. He told host Evans Mensah that pushing for internal reform could cost him personally and that he had made peace with that possibility. “I know it may not be a very easy path. But it’s a path some of us are willing to fight for even at the cost of my political ambition,” he said. The statement landed as a deliberate signal rather than a casual aside, coming from a man who has been publicly linked to future ambitions within the party.
Kwetey extended the hierarchy of priorities beyond party politics, saying that in any choice between Ghana, the NDC, and himself, Ghana must always come first, the party second, and the individual last, and argued that once that hierarchy is understood, there will be no disputes about direction.
He anchored the reset agenda not in policy documents but in the NDC’s own party anthem, pointing out that delegates sing it proudly at every function and that its words already demand members place Ghana above all else. The problem, he suggested, is not that the party lacks values but that too many of its members have stopped living by them. He insisted that even if some delegates do not fully understand those values, that cannot be an excuse to abandon the effort to remind them.
Kwetey rejected the framing that the reset simply means the NPP is bad and the NDC is good, saying the NPP may be bad but that does not make the NDC perfect, and that the party must become better internally if it wants to produce leaders capable of genuinely transforming the country.
He said the 2024 election result itself is evidence that Ghanaians are more discerning than politicians give them credit for, arguing that voters are no longer satisfied with empty promises and are now looking for something more lasting and enduring.
His closing note was addressed not to the party apparatus but to young Ghanaians watching how their leaders conduct themselves. “We owe it to the young generation of Ghanaians to make sure that the examples we are setting are different examples,” he said, adding that political careers are temporary but the foundations laid by leaders endure long after those leaders are gone.
