NPP National Chairmanship Race: Alhaji Short Is Battle-Hardened

We need selfless leaders who, over time, have developed their leadership from learning and experience. In the NPP we need a chairman with depth and experience; that surely only comes with contesting and winning elections and with tenure and learning from mistakes.

As the national chairmanship election draws closer each day, it is imperative we remind ourselves that a history of contesting the chairmanship is not the same thing as holding the office of chairman at any level or acting as such, for that matter. Accordingly, we must discount a history of contesting national chairmanship elections as non-applicable experience. In other words, we must not allow Stephen Ntim’s history of contesting the national chairmanship to pass off as experience of sorts.

No lesson worth learning derives from losing the same election thrice in a row. More importantly, no Joy News or Fox News and no spin doctor can spin three failed attempts at the national chairmanship into a wonder tale of undying party love and loyalty in the face of Ntim’s own public declaration that it is his “lifelong ambition” to be NPP National Chairman, not loyalty to the party, that drives him.

Ntim has four years (only) of near-the-top level party, shadow leadership experience. Vicarious leadership one calls it. It appears to be the main plank of the leadership claims of this candidate. However, it cannot be equated to real leadership under any circumstances. That unique effort of energising the base support of the party, organising party loyalists, motivating them to go out each day to canvass votes for the party, and mounting the rostrum and finding the right rhetoric at rally after rally is rare experience the tip of a Monte Blanc pen cannot bestow on the cv writer. That is how grassroots lessons are learned, grassroots leaders born - only by leading campaigns through years of active service to the party, such as Alhaji Short has rendered to the NPP.

Surely but surely, the noticeable progress a well-led NPP made in an environment as hostile to the NPP as the Upper West must count as stellar stewardship of the affairs of our party and, therefore, must stand the leader of that leadership in good stead, as each of us mulls over who must be the next national chairman. I beseech all delegates to take into account active service in leadership rendered to the party over an extended period - such as Alhaji Short has given. He has won personal elections. He has won general elections for the party. ALHAJI SHORT is your man. He is a solid candidate who will work miracles with the grassroots, on our behalf.

ASEMPA YE SHORT!