The New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) Campaign Manager for the just ended 2020 general, Peter Mac Manu has indicated that the party is set to review its system of electing Parliamentary Candidates (PCs) to represent them during elections.
This statement comes on the back of the NPP suffering some unexpected losses at the parliamentary level at the just ended general election.
According to him, the losses has taught the NPP a lot of lessons and they will work at ensuring that some mistakes that they committed do not happen in successive years.
Speaking in an interview monitored by happyghana.com, he said, “what is next for the party is for us to check what went wrong and what we did right. We need to keenly look at how the party’s parliamentary primaries is conducted”.
He believes that most party members who were not given the opportunity to contest for the party’s primaries worked against them and that affected their votes.
Peter Mac Manu noted that the Member of Parliament (MP) for Fomena, has given him the assurance of rejoining the party and inferred that the party is ready to reconcile with all party members who had fallen out with the party. To him, that is the only way they can support President-elect, Nana Akufo-Addo achieve his mandate.
The NPP primaries saw some of their party members at the constituency levels, wanting to run for the Parliamentary seats on the party’s tickets. They registered their frustration as some were prevented from purchasing nomination forms.
Most of these incidents were predominant in the Ashanti Region and resulted in some of these Parliamentary aspirants running as independent candidates. Some of them were persuaded against that.
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament (MP) for Fomena in the Ashanti Region, Andrew Amoako Asiamah, who was dismissed by the party from Parliament, successfully sailed through to secure a win in the 2020 elections as an independent candidate.
However, at the end of polls on Monday, December 7, 2020, Mr. Asiamah managed to obtain 12,805 of the total votes cast by beating his contenders – Philip Ofori Asante of the NPP and Christiana Appiagyei of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) who polled 10,798 and 2,608 votes respectively.
By: Joel Sanco