Brouhaha over NPP flagbearership
Preceding events leading to the choice of a presidential candidate for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) point to very interesting times ahead. The current ‘jostling’ among contenders brings to memory a similar event in 2007 when 17 contestants threw in their bid to represent the party at the highest level in service of Mother Ghana.
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Thankfully, this time round, the number of competitors has drastically reduced to seven. I believe that the small number of contenders may be due to economic hardship in view of the fact that each person was required to part with an amount of GH¢85,000 in order to become eligible to contest. That is no small money.
It may also be because the party wanted to move away from the situation where the contestants were seen to be chasing the position because of the largess the winner was expected to enjoy once the party won the general election and assumed the reins of government. That occasion presented the largest number of people ever to contest for the presidential ticket of a political party.
That was before; now there are few numbers and one would have thought that with that the kind of internecine feud that was witnessed some years ago would have abated but the bickering seem not to have gone away. The airwaves are constantly charged with accusations and counter-accusations among the contestants and their supporters.
One would have thought that for an opposition party that was gunning to take over power they would put in place a stratagem to keep their house together, for as the Holy Book says, a house divided cannot stand. Anyone who has the means to contest for a particular position must be allowed the freedom to do so; but to go on throwing dust at each other is neither here nor there.
While the bickering is going on their opponents are quietly listening and scheming to use their own arsenal against them in future. Some of the things the contestants mean and say indirectly through surrogates are disturbing and unedifying.
If in 2007 the party was able to weather the storm and got party members on track, it does not mean the same would hold this time round, though I pray it does. That is why the party would have to call a truce.
Last Tuesday, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo launched his third bid for the position of the flag bearer of the party in Accra. He declared that he was psychologically, physically and emotionally strong enough to wrest political power from the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
The event attracted a number of Members of Parliament, some regional chairmen and almost all constituency chairmen from the Greater Accra Region who openly professed their support for Nana Akufo-Addo.
However, the party’s rules and regulations governing the organisation and conduct of the election of presidential candidates in 2014 frown on MPs or party officers at all levels openly declaring support for a particular candidate.
The open support by MPs and some party officers at Nana’s campaign launch has, therefore, not gone down well with certain groups within the party. Their concern is that when people openly defy what has generally been agreed on it may spell disaster in future.
So if their attendance is against party regulations, a way must quickly be found to douse any confusion that this may bring about before it becomes a spectre that will come to haunt the party in future
While this is ongoing, we also await the outcome of the vetting of the aspiring candidates that took place a while ago. In that scenario, the final number of candidates aspiring for the position of flag bearer was expected to be reduced to five. That may be why some of them are preparing quietly in the background, since they do not want to spend unnecessarily when their names may not be among the ‘famous five’.
The NPP, the PPP and, lately, the CPP as well have proven to be vibrant political parties. We await the period when the governing party, NDC, and other opposition parties will also conduct primaries, so that the electorate can have a fair idea of what to expect in 2016.
Meanwhile, there some parties around who do nothing until election time, only to swell up numbers and confuse the electorate. For such parties, the earlier they considered their stand, the better it will be for them because the electorate of this country are now wiser.