Member of parliament for Wa West, Peter Lanchene Toobu, has revealed that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) is setting up the Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, for failure.

According to him, the NPP is being strategic in its election of a presidential candidate because it knows that the 2024 election is a “dead game” for the party, as it can’t get closer to victory.

He explained that the party equally is looking for a way to make up for some mistakes it has done internally by placing Dr Bawumia ahead of the pack to prove the open-mindedness of the party.

Mr Toobu indicated that at this point, no Ghanaian is thinking about the NPP in 2024 because for eight years, the party has run the country to the ground.

“I am saying they are very strategic because when you read the lines, the political colors will tell you 2024 is a done deal for the National Democratic Congress, even though we need to up our game to get a very good percentage to say that we have won the elections overwhelmingly. Apart from that, [NPP] is looking at why will it lose elections and just lose – it needs to lose and gain something.
“[In gaining it], let’s build our party for the future, so let’s push Dr Bawumia forward. For the first time we have a northerner leading the NPP so that he can help take away the Akan tag off the NPP – but if you go and lose, it is not the fault of the party. You led the party into losing the elections. So that next time, if [Bawumia] is not even the presidential candidate, it will be in history, recorded, that a northerner led them there. They’ve set him up for failure totally and he’s so excited to also fail.”
Peter Lanchene Toobu

NPP’s super delegates conference

Commenting on the recently held super delegates conference by the NPP to whittle down the ten presidential aspirants to five, Mr Toobu stated that what the party did was to create an electoral college, skewed towards the Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia. He stated that the astounding victory in the North East Region constituency by Dr Bawumia isn’t surprising, insisting he was “expecting him to win some 80% of the total vote” cast.

“We have over 208,000 people who are going to vote on the D-day, and you have 961 people as a sample – that was really a very bad sample. Over a 193,000 of the people who will be voting are polling station executives – they were not represented in the sample.
“All we had was the constituency chairmen upwards to the national executives. The fact that they elected the constituency chairmen doesn’t mean that he carries the aspirations of all the people in the constituency. If you have polling station executives in there, you will have a very different picture.”
Peter Lanchene Toobu

Moving forward, Mr Toobu emphasized that the results from the super delegates conference may not be the real situation on the ground. With this, he noted that even if an aspirant places fifth in the election, “nobody should be surprised that the last person will win the elections”.

“Because what happened on the D-day where they elected five people, was the fact that 961 people decided to go and reduce the number and each individual from the five has the potential to become the presidential candidate of the NPP, as they prepare to go to opposition.”
Peter Lanchene Toobu