I’m not prepared to respond to Asiedu Nketiah’s allegations – Ofosu-Ampofo

Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, the incumbent National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has refused to be drawn into the controversy triggered by the contents of leaked audio of outgoing General Secretary of the party, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah.

Ofosu-Ampofo who was the subject of allegations by Asiedu Nketiah in the said audio says that he is not prepared to respond to those allegations.

In a Joy News interview, Ofosu-Ampofo stated that his major focus is retaining his seat on Saturday, December 17, 2022 and that he will not be drawn into any saga about the 2020 elections.

Despite repeated attempts by the interviewer to get him to reply to the claims made by Asiedu Nketiah, the NDC chairman maintained that the party has structures to deal with such issues and that it will not be in the interest of the party for him to be seen to be fighting his opponent.

“I don’t want to respond to those reports. If you want me to talk about my preparation and my chances of winning the elections, I will dwell on that but I don’t want to use this platform to react to any of the issues that has been raised by any of my competitors. I’m not prepared to respond to any allegation.

“If you want me to talk about preparations and what I have done and the message I’ve sent to the delegates and the fact that I’m very hopeful that the delegates would extend me to come back, I’m prepared to go to that tangent but I’m not prepared at all to respond to any allegation,” he said.

In the now viral audio, Asiedu Nketiah, among other things accused Ofosu-Ampofo of being an autocratic leader and not open to divergent views.

Asiedu Nketiah blamed the party’s failure to collate results for the 2020 elections on Ofosu-Ampofo, alleging that the National Chairman engaged the service of an IT firm which is owned by someone with connections to Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia.

Asiedu Nketiah also alleged that the party would not have petitioned the Supreme Court to look into the elections had it not been on the insistence of Ofosu-Ampofo.

“I totally understand if anyone says I’m partly to blame for the collation fiasco because all those people undertaking the process were reporting to me but the bit of it is that there were people tasked to do that job”.

He continued: “Mr Ofosu-Ampofo’s so-called ‘robust’ and ‘strong’ IT system he had installed for the collation of results crashed after just five regional results were entered into it for processing”.

“So, that is the truth of the matter”, Mr Nketiah noted.

Following the mishap, Mr Nketia, who wants to nudge off the incumbent chair, who is seeking re-election, said: “We then decided to manually collate the pink sheets”.

Again, he said “the Chairman took over the whole process and brought in some university students to put some documents together”.

However, he recalled: “When it was time for me to mount the dock, it was clear the results they gave me to back our case in court would have brought me nothing but shame and disgrace”.

“We could not have gone to court with those documents as evidence”, he asserted.

“We then carried those same documents to Mr Tsatsu Tsikata, the lawyer, for perusal. After studying the documents, he called us the following day to say if that was the evidence we were taking to court then he wouldn’t be part of the case and suggested we find a different lawyer to represent the party in court since there was no way he was going to be part of it”, Mr Nketiah recounted.

“That is why I told the court we didn’t bring any results when I was asked to produce the evidence”, Mr Nketiah explained to his audience.