NPP's flagbearer election timeline sparks controversy - Ayikoi Otoo weighs in

A Legal practitioner and  leading member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nii Ayikoi Otoo, has stated that the National Council of the party should have waited for the outcome of the National Delegates Conference in July before fixing the date for the election of a flag bearer for the 2028 general election.

“Since the National Delegates Conference will take place in July, let's hold our horses and see how the whole thing plays out and start the conversation after the constitutional amendments,” he said.

Speaking in an interview with the Daily Graphic, Mr Otoo, who is a former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, said reading other views, it seemed to him that the party’s leadership needed to educate and engage more.

“To some, where a flag bearer is elected before other elections of party executives at all other levels are done, that changes what they are used to,” he said.

“Some even believe that approach leads to the person elected practising favouritism and nepotism, using only a small group to run the affairs of the party, especially his campaign team, and being emboldened to decide who to work with, which will deepen cracks in the party.

“One will call it politics of exclusion, which we saw in the recent past, where a leader could boldly say he could not work with other party officials,’ he said.

Mr Otoo added that there was also the risk of factionalism, whereby instead of losing parties coming on board to support the presidential candidate, they went about encouraging their supporters to  preach skirt and blouse voting. 

Timetable

Mr Otoo said, “but before we could deal with that in July 2025, the Council has come out with a timetable for the election of a flag bearer by January 31, 2026, the justification being that when the flag bearer is elected early, he will be like an opposition leader who will speak on national issues on behalf of the party.”

He said it was the announcement of holding an early congress to elect a flag bearer that had sparked all the arguments about the party intending to reverse the time honoured bottom-up approach, saying that amounted to top-bottom approach.

“In other words, that the party will elect a flag bearer at the top before descending to elect party executives at all levels: from polling stations to area co-ordinators to constituency executives to regional executives and to national executives,” he stated.

Nothing different

Mr Otoo said the other view was that “nothing had really changed with the announcement of an early congress to elect the party’s flag bearer two years before the general election in 2028 since we are in opposition.”

Moreover, he said the four-year mandate given to the current party executives would not have expired by January 2026, and therefore, the party leadership at every level would still be in office by January 2026, and would be voting to select the flag bearer.

Probes

He said the history of committees set up to probe why the NPP lost elections showed that those reports were never published for some inexplicable reasons.

That, he said, often left the party faithful to conjecture and come out with their own reasons, saying that, “I am always at a loss to appreciate what the true reasons  why NPP did that.”

Context

The Prof Mike Oquaye Committee was set up to collect views on why NPP lost the 2024 general election.

The Committee later announced that it had concluded its mission and subsequently published its report.

Rather than make the report public or give the party members the slightest idea or an executive summary of the recommendations, the NEC directed that the party embarked on a constitution review without stating the areas of the party’s constitution which required amendments.

Conjecture

Mr Otoo said everything done to date since that announcement had been pure conjecture, drawing inferences from what the Prof Mike Oquaye Committee might have recommended, especially in the area of expanding the delegates system for the election of party executives at all levels, including the parliamentary and presidential candidates.

He said the popular view had been that all card bearing members having the right to vote, whereby the privileged tiny number of delegates who were allowed to vote would be scrapped, or enlarging the delegates system to avoid monetising the primaries.

“Not surprisingly, the overwhelming contributions to the Constitution Review Committee have largely settled on expansion of the delegates system,” he said.