GCPP vice presidential candidate joins LPG

The 2012 and 2016 Vice Presidential Candidate of the Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP), Mr John Amekah, has resigned from the party and moved to the Liberal Party of Ghana (LPG).

Subsequently, he has been appointed as the acting National Chairman of the LPG, a party founded and led by a businessman, Mr Percival Kofi Akpaloo.

Announcing this at a press conference in Accra yesterday, the General Secretary of the LPG, Mrs Margaret Obrine Sarfo, said the arrival of 67-year-old Mr Amekah to the party formed part of a move to assemble the best political brains to strengthen the foundations of the LPG ahead of the 2020 elections.

She described Mr Amekah, who once served as a Deputy General Secretary of the defunct Democratic Freedom Party (DFP), as an “astute politician who understands Ghana’s political terrain and possesses enough knowledge to help build the vision of the party”.

“This is a man who has been playing various roles in Ghana’s politics in the past 35 years. Mr Amekah has been there and witnessed the unfolding story regarding politics in Ghana,” she said.

LPG moves

Mrs Sarfo said when the party heard the news that Mr Amekah had resigned from the GCPP and had expressed interest to team up with the LPG, the leadership of the party did not waste time at all considering the “calibre of person Mr Amekah is”.

“We realised that bringing in a man like Mr Amekah to support and assist our founder, Mr Akpaloo’s vision, will be a great gain. That is why we have him in our party,” she said.

Mrs Sarfo said the party would in the coming months introduce all of its executive and also announce the reforms the LPG would undertake as part of its campaign plans to win the 2020 elections.

Ready to work

In a short speech to the media, Mr Amekah, a former assembly member for the Weija Electoral Area in 1996, said joining the LPG was one of the best decisions he had made in the last 10 years.

Before joining the LPG, he said, he had taken time to understand the party’s philosophy and ideologies and realised that those ideas, when fully introduced, would transform the country’s economic fortunes.

One of the ideas he highlighted was the LPG’s proposal to legalise and regulate the use of marijuana in the country.

He said the benefits of legalising marijuana far outweighed the disadvantages and said he would offer the needed support to the party’s founder in his quest to pursue that agenda.

He said he left GCPP in peace and that he had no personal issues with its leadership, adding that “I have served the GCPP and now I can do more for the LPG”.

Mr Amekah, however, called on Ghanaians to move away from the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and rally behind the LPG “the party with the right development ideas”.

About Mr Amekah

He was born in January 1952 at Oblogo, a suburb of Accra. He served as the chairman of the editorial and legal Sub Committee of Inter Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) of the Electoral Commission (EC) in 1998.

Mr Amekah was also a member of the Ga South District Assembly Executive Committee and Economic Development Sub Committee.