Mac Manu Warns Asawase

MR PETER MAC MANU, National Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) has asked the party's secretariat at the Asawase constituency in Kumasi to settle their differences or risk facing the full rigors of the party's disciplinary measures.

Asawase is the only orphan constituency of the ruling party in the Ashanti Region, as they are yet to choose a parliamentary candidate.

This is due to the fact that some party members in the constituency had secured a Kumasi High Court injunction prohibiting the constituency secretariat from organizing a primary to elect a parliamentary candidate.

Speaking to DAILY GUIDE in an exclusive interview in Kumasi, the National Chairman, who is affectionately called 'the millennium chairman,' said he had given a month's deadline to the constituency secretariat to settle their differences and organize a primary to elect a parliamentary candidate, adding that failure to do that would see the constituency attracting the party's strictest disciplinary rules.

Though Mr. Mac Manu would not disclose the specific type of punishment the secretariat stood to face should they fail to resolve their disparities by the given time frame, he noted that there were a lot of grievous punishment options available to the disciplinary committee of the party that could be brought to bear on the secretariat.

“It is not for nothing that the national secretariat thought it wise to first and foremost organize primaries in all orphan constituencies before proceeding with those in which it has sitting members of parliament,” he stated.

According to him, the national office of the party decided to organize primaries in the party's orphan constituencies to first of all give selected candidates the leeway to market themselves to their constituents as a form of advancing their chances in the forthcoming elections.

“So if this is the intention behind the noble idea, then the Asawase constituency secretariat is frustrating the party's objective by their continual failure to organize a primary as at now,” he noted, adding that “it is the resolve of the national secretariat to get a compilation of all candidates selected in the orphan constituencies before nominations were opened at places where there are sitting MPs”.

Mr. Mac Manu pointed out that his interest did not lie in who was at fault in the constituency but how the executives could reconcile their discrepancies to pave way for a primary to be organized so a candidate could be chosen.

He therefore urged the feuding parties to retreat for the sake of the party.

Meanwhile, DAILY GUIDE has gathered that the District Chief Executive (DCE) for Kwabre in the Ashanti Region, Alhaji Akwasi Yeboah and Dr Mohammed Kabile a.k.a Dr Balla, a lecturer at the Optometry Department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) are the two persons who have filed to contest the primary.

The primary, according to our investigations, was called off at the last hour some two months ago when a group, purportedly displeased about the inclusion of Dr Balla in the contest, secured a Kumasi High Court injunction against the holding of the primary.

The beef of the group was that Dr Balla was not a card-bearing member of the party.

When the constituency chairman, Mr. Peter Okyere was contacted on phone, he told the paper that he and his executives were trying hard to get the case out of court so that the process of a primary could proceed.

From Morgan Owusu, Kumasi