Owusu-Adjapong Calls For Clean Campaign In NPP
One of the leading members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) vying for the chairmanship position has urged contestants at all levels to campaign to reinforce the peace and harmony within the party.
Mr Felix Kwasi Owusu-Adjapong also appealed to all to consider people contesting them not as their opponents but party members trying to appeal to the members to vote for them, all in an attempt to help build a winnable and formidable party to regain power in 2012.
The former Majority Leader told the Daily Graphic in Accra that when all the aspirants contesting positions at constituency, regional and national levels abided by such admonition, forging a united front after the congress to face the common opponent would not be a herculean task.
He said there should not be any cause for members to attack each other, mudslinging and disunity, whose rectification would require energy and resources that could otherwise be used in campaigning.
Mr Owusu-Adjapong, who is credited with mending a lot of rifts in the party on several occasions, explained that the era of sending SMS messages denigrating members of the NPP should give way to healthy campaigning.
The former Member of Parliament for Akyem Swedro assured the rank and file of the party that he would bring his unifying qualities to bear on the party when given the nod as the national chairman.
Nicknamed the ‘Unifier and Digital’, he said he would also ensure that all allegations and propaganda accusations levelled against leading members of the party were adequately refuted and the records set straight.
Although the allegations levelled against the party in the heat of the 2008 were unfounded, they gained grounds and cost the party a fortune. He cited the list of leading members of the Kufuor Administration who were alleged to have kept huge sums of money in their bank accounts at Prudential Bank, an allegation which was not true but which gained currency because the party’s detractors hammered on it.
He said another allegation the National Democratic Congress (NDC) used against the Kufuor Administration was that nothing good came from Kufuor, negating all the socio-economic and political achievements it had chalked up.
He said such allegations should not be treated as though they were meant for an individual, but must be seen as something that affected the image of the party and tended to destroy the credibility of the party and affected its electoral fortunes.
“We should make sure that lies and rumours are adequately refuted and the records set straight. If we do not counteract these capricious lies, the NDC would continue to distribute the non-existing banks accounts and peddle lies to make political gain,” the land economist from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology added.
He explained that the NPP, in its eight-year administration, chalked up great successes in the area of economy, infrastructural development and international relations but the party left the marketing of such achievements in the hands of the government machinery alone, forgetting that not all those in government were NPP members.
Mr Owusu-Adjapong said happily, with the introduction of new structures like the Director of Communication and his two deputies, his administration would adequately equip the directorate to effectively deal with all such issues, get the real situation known at the grass roots of the party to empower them to win souls, as well as set the records straight.
On harmony within the party, he explained that his leadership class, coupled with his non-alignment with any bloc in the party, would afford him the opportunity to erase all such perceptions, which would have a ripple effect at the grass roots.