The Central Regional Minister and Members of Parliament for Ajumako-Enyan-Essiam, Mr Isaac Edumadze has the distinction of being the most controversial minister in the Kufuor administration says the Free Press, reporting that this time around however, his trouble is with his own constituency and the NPP executives there.
Mr Edumadze, according to the paper, had launched a clandestine campaign to remove the executives of the NPP in his constituency and plant his own favourites in their place.
The issue came to light during Free Press investigations at Ajumako into allegations of harassment by Hon. Edumadze of some constituency executives.
The spokesman for the executives Mr Appiah Mensah who is the district chairman of the party stated that immediately after the 2000 elections, Mr Edumadze set in motion a machinery to unseat the present executives whose term of office ends in October 2002 and hand picked his favourites to replace them.
He said this was evident in the fact that when in June this year he was invited to a meeting by the executives to discuss issues affecting the administration of the constituency, he refused to attend and rather sent to hand pick party members and held a secret meeting with them at his resident in Cape Coast.
After the meeting he sent those members he met to incite the rest of the constituency members to revolt against the executives and remove them from office by force before their term elapsed.
Mr Edumadze allegedly also sidelined the executives and hand picked his favourites to attend the recent national delegates congress at Legon.
When they complained in a memo dated June 8, 2001 about the manner that the presiding member of the Ajumako-Enyan-Essiam district assembly and the DCE acted unilaterally by selecting people to serve on the various sub-committees and appointments made by the two officers without consulting the party hierarchy, Mr. Edumadze rather reacted instead of the presiding member and the DCE.
His reaction in a hand written letter addressed individual members of the executives without the chairman instead of dealing with them collectively.
Mr Mensah said he considered the letter not only as a divide and rule tactics but also an intimidation just to put fears into the individual members of the executives to enable him infiltrate and disintegrate them.
They stated categorically that so far as they remained the lawful constituency executives of the NPP they would not budge from any intimidation from any quarters, not when they felt slighted.
All attempts to get Mr Edumadze's side of the story proved futile as he was not available says Free Press.
