Watch your verbal slippages ahead of Nov. polls – Pratt tells NPP

Managing Editor of the insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr has said the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) ought to learn from how villainous pronouncement made the party unpopular in previous election and purge itself from verbal slippages ahead of the November polls.

Pratt said inflammatory language which has been the bane of the NPP’s quest to power in 2012 should have been avoided in the lead up to 2016 elections, but wonders why the party still wants to preach violence in another election.

“Anybody who comes out and says that if so and so were to happen in this elections we cannot guarantee peace, is not saying anything which is substantially different from all-die-be-die; It is the same thing. I have read commentary by leading members of the party who are calculating the damage that this all-die-be-die comment did to them in the last election- I’ve read Arthur Kennedy and co. So you needed to have learnt important lessons from the verbal slippages that occurred in last elections, but now it is getting worse,” the Veteran Journalist said.

The Acting Chairman of the Dankwa-Busia-Dombo tradition, Mr. Freddie Blay recently cautioned that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) cannot guarantee peace after elections if transparency and fairness is not ensured in the November 7 polls.

Many have spoken against such brand of explosive comment from the main opposition, who are alarmed that the statement from by the Acting National Chair of the NPP could be a call to violence ahead of the November polls.

In his analysis on the development on Radio Gold’s Alhaji and Alhaji programme Saturday, Mr. Pratt warned that the repercussions of instigating violence is a danger to all, insisting that violence is not the right option in political discourse.

“Who says you are the guarantor of peace in this country? People have no idea what violence can do to all of us, including them (NPP). The people who are publicly and happily preaching violence, they don’t know what they are doing. I don’t want any violence in this country. I insist on the right thing being done and we should continue to use the appropriate channel to make sure that the right things are done.

“What is IPAC for, if political parties cannot go to IPAC and argue their cases for change in procedure and ensure that things happen properly and are only going on radio to threaten us, then what is the need for IPAC?”