National Council of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has unanimously dismissed a petition by nine aspirants asking for the party’s Special Delegates Conference to whittle down the number of presidential aspirants scheduled for Saturday, August 26, to be at a centralised venue. This was after a crunch meeting was held at the Alisa Hotel on Thursday, July 20.  According to the Council, the party’s constitution and precedent set in 2014 is paramount and ought to be respected. Addressing journalists, General Secretary of the party, Justin Kodua Frimpong said the party will go ahead with its planned decentralised election. “As you are aware, the National Executive Committee earlier met and now the National Council has also just concluded their meeting and key amongst the discussions that went on today had to do with the venue for our special delegates college because per our constitution, if after close of nomination and vetting we have more than five aspirants, the constitution stipulates that we have a special delegates college to trim the number to five.” “So the vetting committee submitted their recommendations to the National Council and the National Council has unanimously approved of the recommendations by the committee, and the other issue was the venue for the special delegates college and after debates amongst ourselves, we came to the conclusion that the precedent set in 2014 should hold.” The nine flagbearer hopefuls excluding Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia have argued that a centralised election would be more efficient and transparent. They insisted that plans to allow only 900 delegates to vote at the regional level do not sit well with them. However, their arguments did not find favour with the second highest decision making body of the party.  The NPP will on Saturday, August 26, cut down the list of its presidential aspirants from 10 to five as stipulated in its constitution. Ahead of that, the party says a new register will be needed for the exercise to weed out those who have passed away and those who are no longer available as delegates. General Secretary Justin Koduah had earlier assured that the new register will be out by the end of the week. “We are in the final stage of doing the compilation. Basically, we are not going to exceed 1,000, so between 900 and 1,000 delegates will form the special electoral college.” “Some of the founding members have died, so we have to take their names out. We also have to look at past national officers. I am sure before the week ends we should have the final list for the special delegates’ election,” he stated.

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Emmanuel Darko

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