Prof. Frimpong Boateng to challenge for NPP flagbearership

Former Chief Executive Officer of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Professor Kwabena Frimpong Boateng, has hinted at contesting the New Patriotic Party (NPP) flagbearership race again.

He said he still harbours presidential ambitions as Ghana is yet to attain the heights he wants to see it.

Impassioned by his interest to help the next generation, Prof. Frimpong Boateng said his utmost ambition "is to see a prosperous Ghana".

He was concerned about the seeming unison within the party for its 2008 and 2012 Presidential Candidate, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

“We are all human beings and we all have our skills and I don’t think any particular person possesses skills to the extent that nobody else should challenge that individual.”

Prof. Frimpong Boateng made these revelations on TV3’s Hot Issues on Saturday, January 18, 2014.

“My ambition is to see a prosperous Ghana,” he told host Kwesi Pratt Jnr.

He said the majority of Ghanaians are not happy with the kind of governance being meted out to them and it is imminent a technocrat like him is put at the helm of affairs.

“I went into politics because these things agitate me,” he passionately disclosed.

Asked what he will do when he becomes president, Prof. Frimpong Boateng outlined that: “First of all, changing education and making sure that [we empower] the scientists that we have now in the CSIR, the universities and [event] people who have not been to school before so that we put in measures to change the structure of our economy and not depend so much on the export of raw materials in its raw state.”

Prof Frimpong Boateng, who established the National Cardiothoracic Center and performed the first open-heart surgery in Ghana, contested the NPP primaries in 2006 ahead of the December 2008 elections but lost to Nana Akufo-Addo.

He said the NPP is currently facing leadership crisis and if drastic decisions are not taken, the party may not be a strong force to reckon with in the 2016 elections.

“For us to come to power, I think we should kill some of our holy cows so that we really look at the state of our nation and what is required to move our nation forward then we can gather the personnel that can move.”