Professor Smart Sarpong has advised the leadership of the ruling New Patriotic Party(NPP) against a decision by the party’s election Committee to select five candidates to contest its main presidential election in November, 2023.
The party will conduct a Super Delegates Congress in August to reduce the number of aspirants from ten to five but in the event where the delegates elect a number less than five, the Committee is said to weigh the votes of the defeated ones and select them irrespective to add up to make five candidates.
This decision is to ensure that no matter the outcome of the Super Delegates Congress, five candidates are chosen to compete in the main congress.
But Professor Smart Sarpong thinks this decision will bring about confusion.
To him, it is not a hard and fast rule that the party should have five candidates to run for the main presidential elections, so whatever number they end up with at the end of the Super Delegates Congress should suffice.
“NEC, don’t allow a sub-Committee you created to create a more complicated situation than you can manage. If you are selecting up to five, you can have one. One is up to five…Two is up to five. In fact, what is not up to five is six; anything beyond five is not up to five…Up to five is a boundary problem; up to five means it is bounded above. It cannot go beyond the upper bound but it ranges between anywhere below the bound”, he said.
The Senior Research Fellow of the Kumasi Technical University also argued that it isn’t advisable for the NPP to choose five candidates because it has got limited time to organize its main presidential election.
“You don’t have time. You only have two months, September and October, to organize the general one and you wouldn’t need to create this thing for yourself,” he told host Kwami Sefa Kayi on Peace FM’s “Kokrokoo” discussion programme.
