‘Voter apathy was devastating’

Former Member of Parliament (MP) for Asokwa, Maxwell Kofi Jumah, has said voter apathy adversely affected the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the 2008 general elections, noting that the issue was particularly acute in the Ashanti Region.

According to him, one of the hurdles the party must deal with, as it prepares for the 2016 elections, is the problem of voter apathy.

“If you remember, in the second round of 2008 elections we had to go round with vehicles to canvass for the people to come out in their numbers to vote… For this reason, we need to find out what accounted for this and work assiduously to fix the problem,” he stated.

Speaking to journalists in Kumasi after submitting his form to stage a comeback for his former position, Mr Jumah, popularly known as Kofi Ghana, said the party owed it a duty to assuage and nurse the inner pains of voters through pep-talks that the NPP was prepared to do well if voted to power in 2016.

“The effort and zeal at which we are now conducting our door-to-door campaign ought to also be directed at voters who are sympathetic towards the NPP. They’ve all seen the hardship in this country, the power crisis and the mismanagement. We have experienced power crisis for almost four years now and still counting,” he noted.

The former MP stated that the party’s campaign message must be crafted in a way that resonates with voters’ expectations, noting that previous campaign messages only targeted people in the cities.

“What I’m saying is that we don’t wear political suit to scavenge the garbage cans for food. We need to go to the people’s level and speak to them about our policies and programmes to be able to win their support,” he admonished.

Kofi Ghana said he was prepared to offer himself as a scavenger to do the party’s bidding and work together with the grassroots for NPP’s victory.

He appealed for support for his bid to become the party’s parliamentary candidate for Asokwa, intimating that he had been tried and tested, and that he was the only leader in the constituency who had achieved a lot for the people.