Yaw Buaben Asamoa
The ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) has said the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) should take the blame of the voter apathy that set in during the just-ended District Assembly and Unit Committee Elections.
Addressing a news conference in Accra yesterday, Mr. Yaw Buaben Asamoa, Communications Director of the NPP, said the hypocritical posture of the NDC towards the election caused many people to stay away from the all-important exercise and must, therefore, take full responsibility for what happened on December 17.
President Akufo-Addo’s determination to deepen local governance was thwarted at the last minute when the NDC members after agreeing that there should be a referendum to change aspects of the 1992 Constitution to pave the way for political parties to sponsor candidates during district assembly elections said they were no longer supporting the move and started campaigning for a ‘No’ vote.
As a result, the President was compelled to cancel the referendum that would have amended provisions in the Constitution for parties to field candidates at the local level, citing lack of consensus.
The Electoral Commission had scheduled the referendum to be held alongside the District Assembly and Unit Committee elections on December 17.
Mr. Asamoa said, “We believe that it is because the NDC broke the consensus that is why interest in the election plummeted.
“There was interest being generated heavily; we were moving on the basis of consensus, because as the President said, this had nothing to do with NDC or NPP but out of ill-faith the NDC chose to turn it into a partisan process and turned round and broke the consensus that we had engineered.”