Mahama LOST, But Not DEFEATED

President Mahama is leaving with all his tattered flags flying. He has lost but he is not defeated. He seems reconciled now and even serene because, like most losers, he has convinced himself, with some reason, that he is a casualty of history.

He has behaved very well since the election. He came in four years ago and he is going out in style. When you lost as I did, he says, it would be a mistake to try to justify it. He is willing to leave the judgment to the historians and the Lord - but he obviously intends to give the historians and the Lord a helping hand.

In a nation that tends to destroy its memory, John Mahama has been careful to keep his own personal record of the last four years.

Other ex-Presidents have had the same intention, but Mahama was more disciplined than most. No matter how tired he was at the end of the day, he dictated his account of the day's events.

Mahama may not try to justify his record now, but he is a determined and comparatively young man as ex-Presidents go, and we will be hearing from him later. He not only has his diary and journal, but will have more documents under his personal control than anybody else. Already he has a conviction about why he lost.

The main reasons he has already stated in public. When he came into office he was faced with an economic crisis in general and an energy crisis in particular.

As Mahama explains it, particularly in private, every important issue he faced at home and abroad, which in his view had been minimized or evaded by his predecessors, cost him votes.

He mentions in private time and again, that there was probably a media bias aspect to his defeat. By his energetic support of infrastructure, so his argument goes, he provoked the opposition of many voters who felt that his appeal was going too far and who voted against him.

All this he will no doubt explain, or avoid, when he goes back to write his books. There will be more than one, he suggests.

Meanwhile, others in his Administration are considering what they will do with their lives at the beginning of the coming year and they will be trying to recoup the financial losses incurred during the last four years. They will be writing and lecturing, not at immodest fees, about the history of the Mahama years and are no doubt now gathering copies of official documents to support their coming books.

Mahama deeply resents the charge that he has been a failure. He will be courteous and generous to Nana Addo between now and the Inauguration, but he is aggrieved by the judgment of the voters and the journalists against him, and is likely to try to prove in the coming years that they were wrong.