Dan Lartey is dead

Daniel Augustus Lartey

Mr. Daniel Augustus Lartey, presidential candidate, leader, founder and chairman of the Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP) is dead.

Dan Lartey, also called Uncle Dan or Domestication, passed away on Monday, December 28, at the Trust Hospital in Accra after a short illness, according to family sources. He was 83.

Henry Lartey, son of Mr Dan Lartey, confirmed the death to Adom FM.

He said the family was meeting Tuesday morning over the bad news but said the family would celebrate the life and death of their father because he had achieved a lot for himself and for Ghana.

Dan Lartey, a staunch vestige of Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party and an Nkrumahist adherent, has run for national president on the ticket of the GCPP on two occasions since breaking away to form the GCPP as a splinter of the CPP.

After the 2000 and 2004 elections, he was only stopped from having a third bite at the 2008 presidential race when the Electoral Commission disqualified him for submitting his nomination papers late. He had just managed to beat an October 17, 2008 deadline for the exercise and paid the stipulated GH¢5,000 nomination fee only to be told of errors in his documents. The documents and money were returned to him but it was too late already to beat the deadline.

A former publisher and labour unionist, Dan Lartey's name became a household one following his 2004 mantra of domestication, a political thought of growing Ghana from Ghana rather than depending on foreign aid and investments.