The NPP’s forthcoming defeat in 2016

The New Patriotic Party is heading for another defeat in 2016. This is despite the woeful performance of the National Democratic Congress government in its recent term in office. If performance of a government alone was enough to win or lose power then in 2008 NPP should have easily won that election – it didn’t. A number of reasons have been put forward and for me the one that stands out is the way the Akufo Addo supporters took pains to divide the party in two from within. This is not to point a finger at Nana Addo but he must take full responsibility as he was the party flag bearer. It was bad enough that we had been split in two in 1979, it is rather strange that our most successful leader JA Kufuor was hooted by someone’s supporters at the Party’s Legon conference in 2005, but it is extremely puzzling that the NPP continues to ensure defeat by sabotaging itself at the constituency level.

In 2008 NPP lost its parliamentary majority. We went from an overwhelming majority to less seats than the NDC. With this result the run off was really a waste of time. The NPP benefitted from such an outcome in 2000 and we knew it was all over when the boot was on the other foot in 2008. The question is what happened at this level? The Party has never made public its findings. For me this is not surprising since it was the Party, essentially, the secretariat in Accra that ensured this loss of seats. In 2008 the practice was to impose candidates from the secretariat on a number of constituencies. This was divisive. Persons unknown to the grass roots in the various constituencies were put forward as candidates of the secretariat. Joe Osei-Owusu, Nana Ofori-Kurago, and Seth Adjei Baah complained about secretariat influence in local primaries. They ran as independent candidates in NPP strongholds and won. This is evidence of how the party worked to destroy itself.

The NPP is planning to destroy itself again in 2016. This time it is not using the secretariat since the results of the April 2014 congress means Nana Addo’s faction no longer control the headquarters. However, this is not an obstacle to self-sabotage. So many sitting MPs who did not indicate support for Nana Addo in the party’s presidential primaries are now going to be targeted for de-selection by pro-Nana Addo members. Fund raising is going on in London. Moves are afoot in Accra and other places to achieve this aim. The grounds for de-selection is not poor performance; the grounds for de-selection is that they dared to support other candidates in the presidential primaries.

A political party will never come to power if it turns on sitting MPs just because they have different views as to who should be the flag bearer. In the run up to the 2000 election and during the 2004 election, the party did not interfere in parliamentary primaries. Then candidate JA Kufuor, and then party executives such as BJ DaRocha and others had no interest whatsoever in who was a parliamentary candidate. Not surprisingly no one who ran as independent after losing the primaries in 2000 or 2004 won. The sitting MP for Abirim lost the primaries in 2004, ran as an independent and was soundly beaten. Similar results played out in Bantama and Tema East as disgruntled NPP members running as independents had no impact on the parliamentary elections. Come 2008, with a different attitude, it was a different story.

What complicated this was the breaking of the relationship we had with the CPP. In 2000 we forged a good alliance with the CPP. Both sides benefitted from this. The CPP got 3 seats in parliament and we developed a strong presence in the Western and Central regions. It was not a coincidence that the party focused on this part of Ghana since this is where JEA Mills was from. This was one of the reasons for the massacre of the NDC in 2000 and 2004 in the Central and Western regions. At the time we respected the importance of a parliamentary majority and did everything to undercut the NDC in areas it controlled. Mr Kojo Armah, Freddie Blay and Paa Kwesi Nduom were all elected MPs largely on the back the of the NPP-CPP alliance. In 2008 this alliance disappeared. No one has explained why. My feeling is that the arrogance in the party was that the NPP could win the 2008 election without any support from our new found allies. Come the day after the first round we had lost 3 seats to independents and the 3 CPP seats had gone to the NDC. If we had retained the alliance we will have gone into the run-off with 111 seats (instead of 108 seats seats) and the NDC will have had 110 seats (instead of 113). Most probably, with our CPP allies holding the balance, and with our candidate ahead of Mills, we would have been returned to power in 2008 and never have heard the nonsensical blaming of JAK, the baseless attacks on the Asantehene, the attacks on the EC, etc as reasons why we lost.

We are working hard to ensure another defeat. We will do so by attacking sitting MPs for the sole reason that they did not engage in hero-worship of Nana Addo. This attack will breed resentment. It will breed division and it will surely guarantee our defeat in 2016.

Kwabena Nyamekye