Dr Kwame Asah-Asante, a political scientist, has cautioned the leadership of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to properly handle the challenges being faced in the party’s nomination processes for polling station and constituency executives.
“Failure to handle the current challenges might go a long way to affect the electoral fortunes of the party, particularly, its objective to win power in the next general election because aggrieved members of the party are likely to leave the party to form another party or simply vote against the party,” he postulated.
Dr Asah-Asante observed that the main problem associated with chaotic situations in some constituencies was that “if the NPP did not manage it well, the party is going to create bitterness, rancour, backbiting and bickering within the party which can derail the agenda to break the 8-year political party power cycle”.
“When some people feel that there is a cautious effort to prevent them from getting the forms, standing and contesting for the election, then the whole atmosphere will be poisoned and they will not trust the electoral processes so it is important that the party looks at the issue carefully if they really want to break the 8.
“If the leadership of the party decide to go on this tangent and members, supporters and sympathisers of the party get ruffled by this, and is not handled carefully, there is the likelihood to emerge an independent candidate,” Dr Asah-Asante warned.
Freddie Blay, the National Chairman of the NPP, has stated that the current chaos being witnessed over the sale of the party’s nomination forms for polling station executives, was not a surprise to him.
He explained that the disturbances happening should be expected because there was bound to be disagreement anytime elections were going to be held however, the leadership of the party would continue to put in measures to ensure that the anxiety among the grassroots of the party didnot generate situations that would affect the electoral fortunesof the party. –ghanaweb.com
