The main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) will give true meaning to its recently announced affirmative action policy if it reserved 50 of its 120 safe parliamentary seats for women aspirants, pollster Ben Ephson has said on Ephson’s file on Starr 103.5FM.
In Mr Ephson’s view, the policy, in its current form, which bars male aspirants from contesting the party’s only 16 female MPs, is not an affirmative action policy in its true sense.
“If the NPP actually wants to have a policy of affirmative action, they could have decided to take 50 of their 120 safe seats and adopt a resolution…that for the 50 constituencies, only females should contest those 50 safe seats then it means that once the elections are held, you straight away you are going to have 50 women in Parliament.
“That’s a better option for affirmative action,” the Managing Editor of the Daily Dispatch Newspaper said Friday.
The policy has angered the grassroots of the party leading to a series of demonstrations and pickets.
One of the beneficiary female Legislators of the party, Dome-Kwabenya MP Sarah Adwoa Safo has spoken against the female-biased policy warning it could cost the party the 2016 polls.
Although she has lauded the policy, she fears the agitations could translate into adverse electoral consequences.
Some of the other female MPs have, however, fully welcomed the policy. One of them is Ablekuma West MP Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, who has accused the party’s communications of “deliberating” working to “sabotage and undermine” its “proper implementation”.
In an interview with Starr News’ parliamentary correspondent Kobby Mensah Gomez on Thursday, Ursula Owusu said the directive had been “botched” by faulty communication.
“We dropped this bombshell on the party without any preparations. We dropped this bombshell on the party and did not manage the communications around it properly. The communications committee was mandated by NEC to go out there and explain why the party had introduced this far-reaching policy.
“They botched it. In fact they even spread more confusion when the director of the committee put it out there that oh, it is just a proposal being considered by NEC, it hadn’t been adopted, a blatant untruth”.
The Ablekuma West MP, however, expressed concern over the fate of the party given the current posturing of the communications team whom she believes might not have the party’s best interest at heart.
“Despite our personal feeling against the decisions of those who gave us the work to do, as professionals, you put your personal feelings aside and you do the work that you’ve been mandated to do. It’s not about you.
“So maybe they deliberately did it to undermine the proper implementation of this policy and if that is the case and they are still managing the communication of the party and they do not like a policy that is introduced by the campaign, is that the same way that they are going to be, we ought to be scared,” she added.
The Party has given indications that it will meet over it for possible review and compromise.
