Kufuor's men take over NPP

Delegates at last Saturday’s National Delegates Conference of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) played to the script when they returned all the “favourites into office, lending credence to speculations that there was considerable arm-twisting by power brokers to determine who controls the party machinery, the Public Agenda, a private newspaper reports.

The outcome of the conference did little to dispel speculations that the 490 delegates were compelled to elect new officers who will be sympathetic to President Kufuor, the paper says.

Presidential favourite, Harona Esseku, 69 won the chairmanship. He polled 348 votes against Samuel Addae-Dua who got 61 and Mohammed Musah.

Esseku according to the Public Agenda came into the top job with a lot of baggage. As Central Regional Vice-Chairman, Esseku was suspended in the run-up top the 2000 Presidential and legislative elections for allegedly indulging in acts detrimental to the party.

The NPP did not specify the offences in public. But sources within the regional party intimated that he stood in the way of many credible party candidates for the legislative elections and might have contributed to the party’s inability to win more than the eight constituency seats to their credit.

Even at the party headquarters, a number of officials look forward to Esseku’s leadership with trepidation; the paper says adding, “Though no one is prepared to go public for fear of retribution, privately, they believe entrusting the leadership to someone who could not run a region successfully, would be disastrous for the future well-being of the party.”

The post of Vice-Chairman went to Stephen Ayensu Ntim. 375 delegates voted for him as against Agnes Okudzeto, 326 and Edmund Annan to the second and third chair-persons respectively. Thirty-two year-old Lord Commey became the national organizer.

According to the paper, some of the delegates alluded to suggestions that “there were intense boardroom lobbying and jockeying, culminating in the mass withdrawal of some contestants to allow the favourites’ easy run.”

The immediate past Chairman, Samuel Odoi-Sykes, now Ambassador, has been doing overtime trying to rationalize the high rate of withdrawals. In one breath, he insisted that no one was coerced to withdraw, in another breath however, he defended a situation where the party top hierarchy feels it would be prudent to re-engineer the internal mechanisms of the party to ensure coherence and unity.

Addressing the conference, Mr. Odoi-Sykes explained that some of the contestants were actually disqualified following detection of irregularities on their nomination forms.

The Abuakwa Constituency Chairman of the party, Martin Douglas Asare debunked this explanation and queried why the rank and file of the party was not informed of the criteria used in the disqualification. “If those people were disqualified, then the procedure was not transparent enough,” he told the Public Agenda.

He however insisted that there was no covert attempt by the national leaders to force the delegates to vote en bloc for specific candidates.

Meanwhile, the Minister for Tourism, Madam Hawa Yakubu, MP has called on the party leadership to move fast to stop the politics of tribalism and power struggle in the party. She said in a radio interview that there are crisis in the party and challenged the President to do something about it.

Hawa insisted that the three Northern Regions are being marginalized in the party. She alleged that a lot of lobbying and bribery was done during last weekend’s conference and cautioned against personal ambitions, which she said would spell the doom of the party. She asked for the inclusion of somebody from the new leadership of the party.