02/07/2026
A PARTY THAT CANNOT PROTECT ITS OWN HAS NO BUSINESS ASKING TO LEAD A NATION ... Okatakyie Afrifa-Mensah ✍️...
Every card-bearing NPP member should be sitting with one question right now, quietly, at home.
If this party cannot protect the people who carry its flag from polling station to polling station, what exactly is it asking Ghana to hand it in 2028?
Across the country, the NPP is building a delegate album, the same album that will go on to elect Electoral Area Coordinators, Constituency Executives, Regional Executives, National Executives, and eventually the men and women who carry the party's name into Parliament.
In constituency after constituency, sitting MPs are simply reaching into that album, striking out delegates they dislike, and replacing them with their own cronies. And the leadership sits aloof, as if this were somebody else's problem.
Court orders are being disobeyed with impunity and yet the people who have every power to act have choosen not to.
Here is the question nobody wants to answer. If a delegate's name is wiped from an album by an MP, will that same man go out in 2028 and break his back knocking on doors for that MP, for the flagbearer, for this party? He will not.
Loyalty does not work like a tap where you can humiliate a man, strip him of a position he earned, watch the leadership shrug, and expect enthusiasm from him years later.
Such a man either stays home or worse, he quietly tells ten neighbours to stay home with him, and none of them tell you why.
Some individuals in this party have grown so powerful that a single phone call is now enough to get a person disqualified from contesting, while the leadership, fully aware, looks away.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, OR JUST A COSTUME?
Now, word is going round that the leadership also plans to shield sitting female MPs from open contest, dressed up as affirmative action.
If the party is genuinely serious about lifting women into power, rather than borrowing feminist language to protect convenient incumbents, the honest place to start is reserving the General Secretary's seat for a woman, someone of the calibre of Ursula Owusu, since, the General Secretary's chair has never once been held by a woman in over three decades.
This is purely parochial interest wearing a nobler costume, and while we are at it, how did that same protection work out the last time the party tried it with Ursula Owusu, Maa Lydia and the Mfantsiman West seat?
Shielding women from fair contest did not save those seats. It only delayed the reckoning until general election day, when the people, not the party, decided who deserved to stay.
GHANA HAS WATCHED THIS FILM BEFORE
This is not the first time NPP wrangling has spilled into the open, and history has never been gentle to the party when it has.
In 2020, Fomena's Amoako Asiamah was shut out by his own constituency, walked away from the primary, ran as an independent, and won. The very man the party tried to humiliate ended up saving its parliamentary majority.
In Bekwai, Joe Wise himself first entered Parliament in December 2008 as an Independent MP, after a bruising internal process locked him out of the NPP ticket the first time round.
In Gomoa Central, A Plus refused to be cowed by disqualification threats, ran independent, and walked away with the seat.
In Asante Akyem North, a constituency carrying the legacy of the late Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, young independent Ohene Kwame Frimpong stepped outside the party's primary entirely and defeated a sitting NPP MP in a seat considered safe for a generation.
When this party lets internal mafiarism choke off fair contest, the people deliver their own verdict, and it is rarely the verdict the manipulators wanted.
THE RUMOUR EVERY DELEGATE SHOULD WORRY ABOUT
There is a troubling rumour, unconfirmed but persistent, that to shield the current 87 sitting MPs from fair contest, those MPs are being quietly asked to pay one million cedis each into the party's coffers, dressed up as a development levy.
If there is any truth to it, this is not party financing but rather the institutionalisation of the same parochial protectionism that already cost the party seats it once thought untouchable. A party that lets MPs buy insulation from fair contest, while ordinary delegates lose hard-earned positions to a phone call, is not building unity. It is stockpiling the same resentment that turned Fomena, Gomoa Central, and Asante Akyem North into losses.
THE MATH NOBODY WANTS TO DO
Protecting incumbents is not even strategically smart because, if the party simply ran free, fair, transparent contests, the overwhelming majority of current seats would likely stay exactly where they are.
MPs with genuine community support do not need a rigged album to win. They win because the people already know and trust them.
What fair contests actually deliver, beyond retaining seats, is new energy: new candidates, new networks, new first-time voters at the polls. That is how a party grows ahead of a general election.
THE WARNING
The conditions that produced Fomena's loss, Bekwai's, Gomoa Central's defeat, Ayawaso West Wagon, Ablekuma West, Mfantsiman West and Asante Akyem North's upset are being quietly recreated today, constituency after constituency, album after album.
History does not knock once and leave. It returns, patiently, until the lesson is learned.
A party that cannot protect its own from internal exploitation, that lets one man's interest swallow the collective, that sits aloof while delegates lose what they earned fairly, and dresses up incumbent protection as affirmative action has no business asking Ghana for the keys to govern in 2028.
Fix the house first or watch the people fix it for you, at the ballot box.
For The People. For Their Honour. For Our Country.
