Nana Addo: NPP's good overrides my ambition

Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has said he stands by comments he made to Victor Newman in 2006 that a party’s collective ambition should always override one’s personal political aspirations.

The flagbearer of the foremost opposition party made these assertions Tuesday December 23, 2015 on Good Evening Ghana on Metro TV. Mr Victor Newman – then Chief Patron of the Friends of Nana Akufo-Addo Institute – had, in 2006, written a letter to Mr Akufo-Addo, then Foreign Affairs Minister, to declare his intent to contest for the flagbearer slot of the NPP, when the succession race to replace then President John Kufuor was heating up. Other aspirants at the time had stolen the start on him by publicly expressing their desire to lead the party into the 2008 poll.

Mr Newman, who is now Director of Research for Nana Akufo-Addo’s campaign team for 2016, had observed at the time that the former Abuakwa South MP was too occupied with government business to stake his claim to the position of presidential candidate, fearing others, who had made their intentions were stealing his thunder.

But Mr. Akufo-Addo replied Mr Newman in an open letter, thus: “The most effective foundation for a successful tilt at the presidency by an NPP candidate in 2008 will be the good performance of the Kufuor government between now and then. If the government delivers on its promise of improving the social and economic conditions of the mass of our people, which it can, the work of the candidate would be considerably lightened.”

Asked by host Paul Adom-Otchere if he had decamped from that view expressed almost a decade ago, Mr Akufo-Addo said: “Not at all.”

“It reflects my thinking; it reflects my thinking throughout my political career. That is the reason why I didn’t find any difficulty from 1998 to 2000 in the campaign to make him [Mr Kufuor] president even though I was the loser of the Sunyani congress of 1998. It continues to be my view that the collective is more important than the individual ambition and that the overall interest …the good of the country should predominate,” the twice-defeated presidential hopeful explained.

Mr Akufo-Addo is making a third attempt at the presidency on the ticket of the NPP, having lost previously to Prof John Evans Atta Mills (late) in 2008 and John Dramani Mahama in the 2012 elections.