Solomon Boar (left), and Sulley Sambian (right)
I surfed the media this morning to keep myself abreast with current happenings in the country. Then I came across the headline above on ghanaweb.com, which was
published on Wednesday, November 15, 2023.
After poring through the news article which discusses the impending parliamentary primaries of the New Patriotic Party, a contest between Hon. Solomon Boar, who is staging a comeback after he lost the 2020 general elections, and Lawyer Sulley Sambian, the acting CEO of the Northern Development Authority.
I found some misleading information and misrepresentation of facts on the electoral antecedents of the Bunkpurugu constituency. As a son of the
constituency and someone interested its politics, I seek to correct such inaccurate information.
First of all, they claim in the publication that the Bunkpurugu seat was snatched from the NPP by the NDC in the 2016 parliamentary elections. This is clearly a falsehood which if the authors of the news article had been a little thorough, would have avoided such misleading information. It is imperative to know that the former member of parliament, Hon. Solomon Namliit Boar, who is returning to contest in the NPP parliamentary primaries, was the MP for the Bunkpurugu constituency from 2012 to 2016 and 2016.
His tenure as a member of parliament ended on January 7, 2021, when he lost heavily to the seating MP, Hon. Abed Bandim. The former minister for the North East Region was able to retain the seat in the 2016 general elections after he snatched the seat from the National Democratic Congress. It is therefore not correct that the NDC snatched the seat from the NPP as we have been told in the GhanaWeb publication.
They also went on to state in paragraph three that “ in 2016, NPP’s Solomon Boar, who is the former North East Regional Minister polled 14,590 votes representing 49.1% to defeat Bandim Abed-Nego Azumah who secured 14,306 votes representing 48.1 percent. In 2020, however, the NDCs Bandim Abed-Nego Azumah obtained 18,023 votes (51.4) beating NPPs Solomon Boar who got 16, 689 votes (47.6).”
Again, this is very untrue. Hon. Bandim Abed-Nego did not contest as a member of
parliament in the 2016 general elections and could not have been there to be
defeated. It is false and the records thus reflect that the contest in the 2016 parliamentary elections was a contest where Hon. Solomon Boar who was the
incumbent, went against Anthony B. Gingong who stood on the ticket of the NDC, Hon. Namburr Berrick, one-time MP (then on the ticket of the NDC), who went as an independent candidate and Nawang David Monipaak of the Convention Peoples Party.
At the end of polls, Hon. Solomon Boar garnered 14,306 votes representing
49,07 percent thereby beating his the NDC Anthony B. Gingong who obtained 48,306 of the votes representing 48.12 percent. Namburr Berrick and Nanang David Monipaak also obtained a paltry 656 and 180 of the votes respectively. From the above, it is therefore inaccurate to state that Abed Bandim was beaten by Solomon Boar because he was not part of the 2016 contest.
Indeed, it was in 2012 when Abed Bandim contested for the first time in the parliamentary primaries of the NDC in the then Bunkpurugu-Yunyoo constituency and lost. His second attempt was in 2019 when he contested in the parliamentary primary of the party, beat his close contenders, and went further to win convincingly in the 2020 general elections where he floored the then incumbent MP, Hon. Solomon Boar, with a whooping vote margin of 1,334 votes.
I cannot tell if this false and misleading information was done for mischievous reasons or due to the incompetence of the writer. Whatever the case, the publishers of this misleading information could have avoided it if they had done a little research on their site.
