Afoko scoffs at NDC tag

Suspended chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Paul Afoko, has mocked at allegations that he had been fronting for the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) while in office.

Asked what he made of assertions by some members of his own party that his actions, while serving as chairman of Ghana’s largest opposition party, gave him away as a mole of the NDC within the NPP, Mr Afoko said: “My reaction is just to laugh at them.”

Mr Afoko, who remains the NPP’s first-ever elected chairman of northern extraction, made the comments as a guest on the Saturday January 9, 2016 edition of TV3’s ‘Hot Issues’.

He said it was the stock-in-trade of persons opposed to him, within his own party, to hang a negative tag around his neck just to destroy his reputation.

“What the people of my party, especially those, who say those things, do is they try to label you. They have to give a dog a bad name and hang it. So, they find anything they can throw to create disaffection,” Mr Afoko explained.

He told host Kwesi Pratt: “You were in Ghana when they said I was a homosexual. They went to all those ridiculous lengths. For a year and half, I have been vilified in the press, especially in the NPP press. They put so many things on me.”

He said the NDC tag may have arisen from his association with persons of other political persuasion, but insists his friendship with such personalities does not compromise his loyalty to the NPP.

“Yes, I have friends in the NDC, I will never deny that. I have friends in the CPP, PNC, everywhere. Some of them we went to school together in the 1960s when there was no NDC, NPP. And today you tell me I cannot associate with them?”

Mr Afoko, together with two other national executives of the NPP – Sammy Crabbe and Kwabena Agyepong – were suspended from the party for actions and comments that the party said could jeopardise its chances winning the 2016 polls.

For those accusing him of being in cahoots with the governing party, Mr Afoko had these words for them: “I went to jail because of NDC. So, if they say Afoko is NDC, given my credentials, then I pity them.”