Governance Research Bureau urges NPP not to be complacent about Western Region

The Governance Research Bureau on Thursday cautioned the New Patriotic Party (NPP) against the belief that it will win the Western Region in the 2020 Election as it did in 2016.

Rather, the Bureau said, the NPP should research into the factors that led to the loss of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the Region and learn lessons from them because they found themselves in a similar situation as the NDC in 2016.

This was contained in a statement jointly signed and issued in Accra by Dr Kwame Asah Asante and Dr Ezekiel Nortey, both resource persons from the Bureau.

It said in the 2016 Presidential Election, the NPP’s average votes of 482,000 in the Western Region, since 1992, shot up dramatically to 500,000, while that of the NDC’s average vote of 520,000 dropped to 482,000.

This, according to the statement, should be a source of concern to the NDC because their loss was a gain for the NPP, which overturned the tables by winning 16 out of the 26 constituencies in the Region, the same seats that were won by the NDC in 2012.

It said the performance of the NPP in the Region in 2016 reflected its status as a swing region in which victory had alternated between the two parties.

It recommended that the NDC should work to maintain their average performance of 520,000 votes or better it in addition to winning Shama, which was a swing constituency with huge votes.

The statement urged the parties to work to maintain or improve their average performance in their strongholds and work hard to win the Shama seat.