By Dennis Peprah
Sunyani, (Bono), Dec. 10, GNA – Mr Maxwell Mahama, a former Communication’s Officer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the Sunyani East Constituency, says the party lost the Election 2024 partly due to the poor conduct and re-organisation of its polling station elections.
He asked the party to “do a serious retrospection, step back, and reorganise our NPP”, and asked party members to remain bold, courageous, sincere and truthful towards rebuilding the NPP to put the party on the edge to regain political power in Election 2028.
“We shall be stronger and regain political power in 2028 if we genuinely ponder over this embarrassing defeat, and put up a new reorganisation agenda, build a solid ground towards the resurrection of our Party”, he said in a statement copied to the Ghana News Agency in Sunyani.
“As a political party, we lost over 50 parliamentary seats, and lost virtually all our traditional regions, simply because there is a serious apathy on the part of the rank and file”, the statement added.
It underlined the need for the leadership of the NPP to desist from building the party “around sitting Members of Parliament (MPs)”, saying “our MPs should not be allowed to control our delegates”.
“We must change from the delegate system to the electoral college system. The Delegate system here means that selfish individuals like MPs, national, regional and constituency executives should not be allowed to be choosing delegates in order to vote for them during primaries”.
“This automatically amounts to imposing unsuitable candidates onto the Constituency”, it said, explaining that the “electoral college is where every card-bearing member is allowed to vote and elect presidential and parliamentary candidates, national, regional and constituency executives”.
The statement stressed the need for the party to also largely expand its electoral system so that the majority of the party members could be allowed to elect the executives at all levels.
“Over 90 percent of our party members don’t have membership cards. The issuance of the biometric membership cards were all shrouded in secrecy by some MPs, national, regional and constituency executives and this is very bad and avoidable”, it alleged.
“In fact we need a new vision and new direction and under no circumstances should any constituency officer be allowed to supervise the registration of party members for Identification Cards (ID) to avoid corrupting the whole process”, the statement added.
GNA