Trouble brews in Suhum NPP

Suhum (Eastern Region) - There are clear indications that soon the New Patriotic Party (NPP) supporters in Suhum may clash with their constituency executives.

Their reason for the possible clash is that they do not understand why the executive officers should parade a prospective parliamentary candidate while there is a sitting Member of Parliament (MP) for the area in the person Ransford Agyepong.

This came to light when The Ghanaian Chronicle toured the constituency last Thursday after receiving complaints that the party executives’ candidate is in the person of Opare Ansah. Speaking to the paper, Michael Korang, said that since the party won the last general elections in the Suhum constituency, the executives have never seen eye to eye with the MP.

The paper gathered that the constituency chairman, Osei Bonsu, with his other executives, has been going round the area introducing the prospective candidate to members against their wish.

It also became evident that Osei Bonsu has dissolved the polling station chairmen, who are the party’s main structures in the constituency as far as winning the election in the area is concerned. But he has set up his own polling station agents who are not true party activists but rather people the party contracted to be ‘watchdogs’ at polling stations in the last elections.

Investigations revealed that these party executives apart from parading Opare-Ansah as MP-to-be, have been taking photographs of the so-called polling station agents to compile an album without the support and presence of the MP.

These have generated a lot of furore in the true NPP NPP activists who are now threatening to either attack the constituency executives or defect to other minority parties. The MP, Agyepong, admitted that his constituency executive had been parading a prospective candidate against him, the sitting MP. This, he observed, is causing a lot of disunity in the party in Suhum constituency, which he feared may cause the NPP’s fall in 2004 elections if unchecked.

Agyepong appealed to his supporters not to take the law into their own hands by staging any attack as the regional executives have taken notice of the issue and are trying to settle the matter amicably.