NPP knew they were going to lose 2012 elections - Tony Aidoo

Head of Policy, Monitoring and Evaluation at the Presidency, Dr Tony Aidoo, claims the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) ‘knew they were going to lose the 7 and 8 December 2012 elections’ before votes were counted and results declared by the Electoral Commission.

According to him, this was because, the NPP kept issuing threatening statements which was supposed to scare voters into thinking that if they don’t vote for the NPP, there will be war in the country.

Dr. Tony Aidoo made the comments in relation to the oral addresses given by the Lead Counsels of both the respondents and petitioners in the ongoing election petition suit before the Supreme Court.

Contributing to a panel discussion on Radio Gold’s “Alhaji and Alhaji” programme on Saturday, Dr Tony Aidoo surmised: “As far as two years ago, the NPP knew they were going to lose the elections...Look at the pronouncements they were making; that if the NPP is not made the winner, Afghanistan, all die be die, at all cost we must win the 2012 elections…all those represents an attempt to intimidate the electorate towards accepting the situation that if you want peace, you must have the NPP in power. That was all it was meant to be and it obviously backfired”.

According to him, the NPP were only able to garner a few votes after they changed their message to ‘the popular free education gimmick’.

In terms of the oral addresses, he said the respondents did well in exposing the ‘numerous contradictions’ characterized in the petitioner’s case.

He advised the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to take a cue from the circumstances leading up to the filing of the election petition by the NPP saying: “this should be a lesson to the NDC to realise for the first time that it is about time it recognise and own up to its ideological orientation and did something relative to what it claims it stands for, otherwise most of its policies and programmes will be the same as the NPP; people will not see the difference. The only difference will be in terms of personalities and we don’t want personality politics”.