Longest-serving PM rejected

Members of the Bosomtwe District Assembly have rejected Mr Joseph Kwasi Asumin, the longest-serving Presiding Member (PM), as District Chief Executive (DCE).

In an election supervised by the Bosomtwe District Electoral Officer, Mrs Ernestina Owusu-Banahene, out of the 50 members who voted at the meeting last Friday, 25 of them voted YES while the remaining 25 voted against him.

Mr Asumin, a lawyer by profession, is the longest-serving PM of the Bosomtwe District Assembly.

He is currently the Asokwa District Manager at the Small Tax office of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the Assembly Member for the Woarakose-Onwi Electoral Area in the Bosomtwe District.

He was elected a PM in 1998, but resigned in 2005 to undertake a professional law course at the Ghana School of Law.

He, however, made history in October 2015, when he was re-elected the seventh time as the PM by the Bosomtwe Assembly, making him the longest-serving PM in the Ashanti Region and the nation as a whole.

Since he failed to get the two-thirds expected for an approval, the assembly has fixed next week Tuesday for a rerun.

Among the dignitaries who witnessed the endorsement were the Ashanti Regional Minister, Mr Simon Osei-Mensah, a former Ashanti Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr Robert Yaw Amankwah; and two former DCEs, Mr James Fosu and Madam Veronica Antwi-Adjei.

Record

The Bosomtwe District can boast of producing the current Ashanti Regional Chairman of the NPP, the Regional Minister, Mr Simon Osei-Mensah, and a Deputy Minister of Education in charge of Pre-Tertiary Education, Dr Osei Yaw Adutwum.

Addressing the assembly before the voting, Mr Osei-Mensah urged the members to consider the honour done the district by appointing two ministers from the area among other things and endorse the appointee.

A former Regional Chairman of the NPP, Mr Robert Yaw Amankwah, called on all members of the assembly to unite and put all difference behind them and think about how they could work together to promote the development of the district and the nation as a whole.

He explained that with unity, there was nothing they could not do as an assembly and asked them to put all political differences aside and vote for the president’s nominee.