Tomorrow Saturday August 26, all eyes will be on the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) as it heads to the polls in a Special Delegates to reduce the 10 aspirants to five.
956 delegates are expected to vote in the special exercise to reduce the number of aspirants from 10 to five.
The thoroughbreds in the hot contest comprise the Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia; former Trades and Industry Minister, Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Assin Central, Kennedy Ohene Agyapong; the MP for Essikado-Ketan, Joe Ghartey, who is also a former Minister of Railways Development and Attorney-General and Minister of Justice; a former Minister of Energy, Boakye Agyarko; and a former General Secretary of the NPP and Press Secretary to President J.A.Kufuor, Kwabena Agyei Agyepong.
The rest are former Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto; a former Commissioner of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Dr Kofi Konadu Apraku; a former MP for Mampong in the Ashanti Region, Francis Addai-Nimoh, and an energy expert, Kwadwo Poku.
Disturbingly, the public space is awash with reports that some of the aspirants, have turned this very important exercise into a charade of buying and selling of votes.
Aspirants, desperate to be part of the five, are said to be trying to outdo one another in doling out huge sums of money to delegates in order to vote them.
As a newspaper, we are concerned that both the aspirants and the delegates seem to have a completely erroneous idea of what an election entails.
By aspirants seeing it as the contest of who has the bigger pockets and delegates seeing their positions as a means to make a fortune in the political season, the polity is denied the opportunity of having campaigns based on robust debates about how each aspirant perceives the challenges facing the society and how they hope to tackle them.
It is how original and convincing the arguments and solutions proffered by the aspirants are that party delegates will consider to see whether they can be sold to the voting public to choose the party’s candidates at the general poll.
This newspaper, condemn in no uncertain terms this resort by the flagbearer hopefuls and their supporters to reduce the important task of leadership recruitment to a matter of the highest bidder. The NPP should not be for sale.
Voter inducement is a danger to our nascent democracy, because it undermines the greatest attribute of democracy – freedom of choice.
This newspaper wishes all the ten aspirants the best of luck.
