Clergyman, Rev Kweku Addo, has told the story behind his decision to venture into politics and how he won the Ablekuma West Constituency seat for the National Democratic Congress (NDC) for the first time since the creation of the constituency in 2012.
Speaking in an interview on Metro TV on Tuesday, December 17, 2024, Rev Addo narrated how he was encouraged to enter into politics by his relations who believed that he could bring the needed change to the constituency.
He said that he was encouraged to join the NDC by a friend, Humfrey Mensah, who is the son of the late statesman ET Mensah, while he was in the United States.
After attending a few meetings of the party and reading its constitution, he said he came to the realisation that the NDC was not “a bad group.”
The pastor said that he then decided to contest in the party’s primaries in the Ablekuma West constituency in 2019, which he won but lost the main election in 2020.
He won the party’s primaries again in 2023, and the lessons from the 2020 Election helped him oust the incumbent MP, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, who has represented the constituency since its creation.
He indicated that one of the key things that helped him win the seat was that he understood the animosity some residents of Ablekuma West Constituency had against the NDC and managed to reason with them.
“If you look at the demographic of the area, you realise that from Exhibition heading towards Sahara into Roundabout, Zodiac was predominantly Akans, and then the southern part was more Ga and Ewes. What I realised was that in the past we had Victoria Hamah come and then Mrs. Dinah Twum, they were both females. And then I came in as a male, which now would change the dynamics. So, what I started doing was going into where the Akans were and selling myself as one of them.
“And then I understood why it had become more tilted towards NPP. When you look at the history when Dansoman started, General Acheampong had asked the Kwawu people, the Asantes to come into the estates, which they did. And then Rawlings came and then the coup happened and then most of them were the ones who lost their money, lost their businesses. So, it was engraved in the children that PNDC, NDC messed us up,” he narrated.
The MP-elect recalled an incident when a constituent nearly beat him up because he blamed the NDC for him not getting a university education.
He said that in addition to the fact that a lot of the original settlers were of Akan-origins, he succeeded in making the parliamentary election about the needs of Dansoman.
“For now, most of us, our parents who had that ideology have passed on or they've aged. So, I took advantage of that to let them know, ‘Yeah, my father was an Akan, my dad was arrested during that period’. But the fact is that now we are old how do we deal with Dansoman?
“I focused my conversation mainly on Dansoman, the biggest estate. Do we really have what it deserves for us to be proud of? And so that’s how that aspect of conversation started. And the response over time you realise that it wasn’t that bad,” he said.
Watch his remarks in the video below:
BAI/AE
Watch a compilation of the latest Twi news below:
Watch the latest episode of Trending GH on GhanaWeb TV below:
Copyright © 1994 - 2024 GhanaWeb. All rights reserved.
