A member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) national communications team,Ellen Ama Daaku, has proffered that Members of Parliament (MPs) who lost their seats in the 2020 polls were either out of touch with their constituents or imposed on them.
She insisted that the party’s leadership unresolved internal issues were largely to blame for the loss and specifically cited issues relating to ‘out of touch’ MPs and in other places, the imposition of candidates on voters.
“I do agree that we had our internal party issues, and we are still having it, I also do agree that some of our MPs lost touch with their base and some of them were practically forced on the people which became obvious there were problems and challenges ahead of the polls,” Madam Daaku postulated.
Giving her diagnosis of how and why the party lost heavily in the 2020 parliamentary elections, she said some constituents were simply tired of their MPs because they had stayed too long in office while others were imposed on them which really affected the party in the parliamentary race and it happened mostly with incumbent governments.
According to her, the party, unlike the National Democratic Congress (NDC), had yet to release a report on its post-mortem of the 2020 elections which saw incumbent Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo retained as president but with heavy casualties in the legislature with 28 incumbent NPP legislators lost their parliamentary seats in the elections.
Madam Daaku noted that 21 of them were either ministers, ministers of state, or deputy ministers and the current Parliament with137 lawmakers on each side with the sole independent candidate and MP for Fomena in the Ashanti Region, Andrew Amoako Asiamah, giving the NPP the majority.
She explained that incidentally, the independent MP, who was also the Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament, was ousted by the NPP after he pushed ahead to stand as an independent candidate after ‘unfairly’ losing the party primaries.
Madam Daaku indicated that the Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin, had put on record that there is no clear majority in the House but that the NPP and its ally from the ‘Majority Group’ and the NDC from the ‘Minority Group’. –ghanaweb.com
