90% votes in Ashanti region 'non-negotiable' – Wontumi

Nana Akufo-Addo will win at least 90 per cent of votes to be cast in the Ashanti Region in the 7 December polls, regional chairman of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr Bernard Antwi Boasiako has said.

The NPP’s share of votes in the region, the party’s stronghold since Ghana’s return to multi-party democracy in 1993, has tumbled from 78 per cent since 2008 to 70 per cent in the last elections in 2012.

But Mr Antwi Boasiako, more popularly known as Chairman Wontumi, was adamant the NPP would meet the electoral target despite a dip in fortunes in the last eight years, saying God did not propel him to his current position as regional party chair only to “disgrace” him.

“So, God is going to give this Ashanti vote to me. So, 90 per cent, they cannot negotiate with me. …Yes, 90 per cent for Nana Akufo-Addo,” he told Paul Adom-Otchere on Good Evening Ghana on October 4, 2016.

He warned the Electoral Commission that he and the NPP would not “tolerate” any attempts to rig the elections, as he claimed happened in 2012, occasioning the party’s defeated presidential candidate, Mr Akufo-Addo, to challenge the poll result at the Supreme Court – a case he subsequently lost.

Further, Chairman Wontumi promised that the NPP would annex the four parliamentary seats in the Ashanti Region which are currently occupied by NDC MPs.