President asked to name running mate
The National Democratic Congress has appealed to President John Dramani Mahama to trigger the process of presenting the party with his running mate.
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According to the party, an early announcement of a running mate and the launch of the party’s manifesto before the end of this year would help the NDC put its campaign into full motion at the beginning of 2016.
The call comes after President Mahama received 95.2 percent endorsement from party supporters as the party's presidential candidate for the 2016 election at the weekend’s primaries.
At the post-primary briefing in Accra last Tuesday, the General Secretary of the NDC, Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketia, said: "In the days ahead, we have the following activities to conduct, hopefully before the end of the year.
First he said: “we will move as expeditiously as possible to conduct the last batch of six parliamentary primaries; and second, ‘’ the selection of our running mate and the unveiling of all our cand
Manifesto launch
“Once the nominee is accepted, he is unveiled. We ought to finish this process of filling our slots by completing our parliamentary and presidential primaries. Getting our running mate and then getting our manifesto launched, then the rest will be coasting down to victory,” Asiedu Nketia added.
Meanwhile, the National Democratic Congress is warning aggrieved aspirants in last Saturday’s primaries to avoid going to court when internal processes have not been exhausted.
Going to court should be a last resort else one would be “flouting the rules of the party”, the Director of Elections of the NDC, Samuel Ofosu Ampofo told Joy News.
Heading for court
From Mion in the Northern Region to Ada in the Greater Accra Region, some defeated parliamentary aspirants are heading to court over what they described as irregularities in the polls.
While an aspirant in the Ada Constituency, Charles McCarthy who lost to Comfort Doyoe Cudjoe Ghansah, is blaming his defeat on the removal of some names from the register, his colleague in the Mion Constituency, Dr Mu-Awia Zakaria, who lost to Mohammed Abdul-Aziz, said the real result was not declared and wanted a recount. Similar actions have been taken by the incumbent MP for Afram Plains North, Aboagye Didieye, who also lost to Betty Krosby Mensah.
But Mr Ofosu Ampofo, who is also the First Vice Chairman of the NDC, is charging the defeated aspirants to channel any “genuine concern” through the party structures for redress.
He insisted that the party never had any intention to use the primaries to punish any contestant.
Healing process
He said the party was, therefore, open and willing to address challenges when they were brought to its attention.
For those who have taken their grievances to the media, he advised that seeking redress in the media was “needless”. “We don’t solve concerns in the media,” he counselled.
There are internal processes that one ought to follow in order to address such concerns, he reiterated. He said the national office had also received a comprehensive report of the primaries from all the regions and already, the party had started reaching out to all contestants in last weekend’s primaries.
The party calls it a “healing and reconciliation process,” Mr Ampofo said, as the process begins tomorrow in the Central Region.
