Remain calm — Asiedu Nketia urges NDC supporters
The leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has assured the rank and file of the party that it will use its internal mechanism to resolve nagging issues pertaining to the conduct of the regional and national elections of the party.
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It stated that as a democratic institution, it would use the party’s rules and those of the country to address the issues and run the affairs of the party.
The party, therefore, appealed to its members to remain “calm and be rest assured that we will act according to our name as a democratic party”.
At a press conference at the new party headquarters at Adabraka in Accra yesterday, the General Secretary of the NDC, Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketia, said, “We want to assure everybody in the NDC and Ghana that decisions about the guidelines, elections and decisions emanating from the people are not the sole work of the general secretary, as some people have been made to believe.
“We will abide by the court’s suggestion that we reconsider handling the regional elections case out of court and we will use the internal structures of our party to deal with the matter.
“As the General Secretary of the NDC, I have listened to what the court has said and I will consult and call for an emergency Functional Executive Committee (FEC) meeting to look into suggestions of the court and prepare the ground for an emergency National Executive Council (NEC) meeting to allow everybody to have a bite at the issue,” he said.
Mr Nketia was flanked by the National Organiser of the NDC, Mr Yaw Boateng Gyan; the Women’s Organiser, Ms Anita De-Soso; the Member of Parliament for Tain, Mr Gyan Tutu, and some regional executives.
Background
The party was reacting to bad publicity directed at it following a suggestion by a High Court in Kumasi that the leadership of the party put its house in order by settling issues concerning the conduct of its national and regional elections out of court.
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That was after some members of the party had sought an injunction to restrain party executives from conducting national and regional elections, especially about guidelines that appeared to disqualify some aspirants.
Eligibility criteria
Mr Nketia said elections at the branches and the constituency levels of the party had already been completed, and when plans were far-advanced to start the national and regional elections “we were hit by the Supreme Court case challenging such elections.”
“As we prepared to hold our regional elections, some members of our party in the Ashanti and the Greater Accra regions went to court to seek clarification of certain guidelines that set eligibility criteria for members to contest elections at the regional level,” he said
Collective decision
To address those grievances, he said the NEC and the FEC took a second look at the earlier guideliness and therefore, denied suggestions that the “guidelines were my individual decision to disqualify some aspirants.”
“When the NEC made the decisions on the guidelines,reactions started coming in again and the very people who insisted that our suggestion to reconsider the guidelines should be ignored are the very same people who go outside and preach that I, Asiedu Nketia, brought the guidelines to disqualify some people,” he explained.
He was worried about such attitude on the part of some party executives bent on painting a bad impression about him as the one manipulating the disqualification of some people to contest the regional elections.
“The way to serve our party is to be truthful and courageous to accept and stand by the collective decisions we all make,” he added.