Stephen Ntim
The National Council of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has carefully decided to hold its conference to elect its flagbearer for the December 2024 presidential elections on November 4, 2023, DGN Online can report.
Opening of nomination for presidential primaries has been scheduled to commence on Friday May 26, 2023 with the closing date fixed for Saturday, June 24, 2023.
The Council has also attentively concluded to conduct its parliamentary primaries to elect parliamentary candidates for constituencies where it has sitting Members of Parliament (MPs) on February 24, 2024.
It will open nominations for the parliamentary primaries on December 20, 2023 and close it on January 4, 2023.
Currently, the party in the 8th Parliament has 137 seats. The Independent MP for the Fomena Constituency however works with the NPP Caucus, which brings the number of the majority side to 138.
The National Council reached these conclusive timelines at its meeting held at Alisa Hotel on Monday.
Constituencies with no sitting MPs, otherwise known as Orphan Constituencies, will have their nominations open on 16th June, 2023 and 14th July, 2023 for closing.
The Elections for parliamentary candidates for the orphan constituencies is fixed for 2nd December, 2023.
The forms for the parliamentary aspirants is fixed for GHC3,000, while filing fee is GHC35,000.
There is Development levy of GHC40,000 possibly to be paid by aspirants challenging sitting MPs.
There are currently 136 orphan constituencies with the exception of the Assin North Constituency seat which is technically vacant because of a Supreme Court injunction on the sitting NDC MP stopping him from holding himself as an MP. The case is however pending at the High Court.
Ahead of the National Council meeting, some NPP Members of Parliament advocated for the party’s presidential and parliamentary (sitting MPs) primaries to take place at the same time.
However, the National Council is said to have suggested that the presidential primaries should take place in November 2023, 13 months to the 2024 elections, while the parliamentary primaries for sitting MPs take place in February 2024, 10 months to the general election.
Already, NPP has conducted its internal elections from 19 February through to 16 July 2022. The party during this period, elected her polling station, constituency, regional and national executive.
The polling station level elections were held from February 19 to March 5, 2022 while the electoral area elections took place from March 18 to March 20 2022.
The constituency executive elections were held at the Constituency Annual Delegates Conference which was supervised by Constituency Election Committees between April 22 and April 24, 2022.
The regional executive elections and for that matter the Regional Annual Delegates Conference were held between 20 and 22 May 2022, and it was supervised by the Regional Election Committees.
The last election held was the National Executive elections. It was conducted during the party’s Annual National Delegates Conference which took place from 14 to 16 July 2022 at the Accra Sports Stadium and it was supervised by a National Elections Committee.
Meanwhile, the party has decided on August 26 for Special Conference if more than five aspirants filed for the presidential primaries.
By Vincent Kubi