Let’s educate our members on party’s philosophies – NPP coordinator

Mr. Richard Kwadwo Adu, the Brong-Ahafo Regional Coordinator of Nana for President 2012 (NAFOP), a youth wing of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), on Tuesday appealed to the party hierarchy to educate members on the ideologies and philosophies upon which the NPP was formed.

NAFOP is a youth group in the NPP working to ensure victory for the party and its presidential candidate, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in election 2012.

Mr. Adu told the Ghana News Agency in an interview in Sunyani that majority of the current generation did not know the purposes behind the formation of the party.

He said if the youth wings of the party understood the beliefs and principles of the party, it would position them well to campaign effectively for more votes in election 2012.

He said the electorate had come to understand multi-party democracy and that any political party that would be able to convince them on its policies and programmes would win power.

Mr. Adu said because many of the NPP members, supporters and sympathizers lacked some basic principles of the party, they found it extremely difficult to propagate these ideas to the electorate especially those at the grassroots.

He said other parties especially the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had capitalized on such ignorance and continued to paint wrong picture about the NPP.

Mr. Adu, who is also a leading member of the NPP in the Wenchi Municipality, said the party leadership should take it as a challenge to dispel the wrong perception that the NPP was solely an Akan party.

He said these wrong ideas in the mind of some of the electorate especially in the Northern, Upper East, Upper West and Volta regions seriously affected the party’s fortunes in the last general election.

Mr. Adu said the NPP continued to remain a great party under a “strong elephant” which frowned on ethnicity and other tribal sentiments.

He said the NPP was defeated in election 2008 because many of the members failed to participate in the second round election as a result of some basic problems.

Mr. Adu said as the party was poised to regain power, members should bury their differences for a united front and identify and tackle the diverse problems that made the party to lose power.

He said without unity among them, all efforts by the party to capture power would be in vain.

Mr. Adu said Ghanaians had embraced policies such as the free secondary education proposed by the party’s flagbearer and were yearning for its implementation, adding it would be realistic if they voted massively for the party.

He said since the NDC was desperate because the government could not fulfill its 2008 campaign promises, they would adopt political tactics that would irritate NPP members in the campaign to create tension and capitalize on that to use state machinery to rig the election.

He said the only way the NPP could counter such deliberate intentions was for members to be tolerable and exercise patience at extreme provocations since the party would ensure a landslide victory in the election.

“This does not necessarily mean that we should sit down and allow the NDC to intimidate our supporters to rig the election”, Mr. Adu said.