Nana Obiri Boahen Slams NPP’s Top-Down Election Plan, Calls It ‘Disgusting’
Former Deputy General Secretary urges party to return to grassroots voting tradition
- Lawyer Nana Obiri Boahen condemns NPP’s decision to elect the 2028 presidential candidate before other executives,
- He urges proper member registration first
- Obiri Boahen warns of potential legal challenges and calls for a level playing field for all party aspirants
Lawyer Nana Obiri Boahen, former Deputy General Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), has voiced strong opposition to the party’s recent decision to adopt a top-down approach in electing its executives for the 2028 election cycle.
The party has slated the election of its presidential candidate for January 31, 2028, before selecting other executives, a move that Obiri Boahen describes as “inappropriate and disgusting.”
Speaking on the party’s established traditions, Obiri Boahen emphasized that since 1992, the NPP has upheld a grassroots-driven electoral process — “from the base to the top.”
He criticized the current plan for reversing this order, asserting that the “new executives come to elect,” and called for proper registration as the first step in the electoral process.
“The reasonable thing to do is to first do registration,” he stated, underlining that bypassing this step undermines democratic participation within the party.
He also dismissed concerns that conducting fresh registration could advantage the rival National Democratic Congress (NDC), calling it “not true.”
Highlighting systemic issues within the party’s electoral mechanisms, Obiri Boahen suggested that the NPP’s loss of several parliamentary seats could be attributed to flawed processes, including fraud and skewed results in the selection of executives and parliamentary candidates.
He advocated for scrapping the delegate system entirely, citing global best practices and the party’s own previous efforts to restructure its electoral framework.
“The NPP is not doing well based on what they are doing,” he said candidly.
Despite his critiques, Obiri Boahen expressed wholehearted support for Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia but stressed the necessity of creating a level playing field for all aspirants within the party.
Obiri Boahen also warned of the dangers of recent decisions related to election preparations.
Reflecting on the 2024 election, he lamented that his warnings for deploying the military were ignored, calling the step “wrong and dangerous.”
He further cautioned that if the current top-down approach is not corrected, it could trigger legal challenges, predicting that “somebody might place an injunction on the primaries.”
