Story By: Nicholas Osei Wusu
Voting has resumed after close to two hours of a partial halt in the ongoing Conference of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) at the Baba Yara Sports Stadium in the Ashanti Region to elect new executives for the region.
The incident occurred at Voting Centre One otherwise christened “Zone One”. It is the voting centre for 15 of the Constituencies.
Five of them had successfully voted before the process came to an abrupt end at about 1pm when it got to the turn of delegates from the Obuasi West Constituency.
The reason for the disruption in the process is unclear but snippets of allegations gathered by GBC has it that a Court injunction has been placed on the delegates from Obuasi West while some delegates from that Constituency also said that particulars of those delegates are not complete to enable them take to take in the process.
They also decided to block the voting process until their concerns were resolved.
Officials have confirmed that only delegates from the Mampong Constituency are not exercising their franchise since the party is yet to organize elections in that Constituency due to some internal disagreements.
The Elections Committee has yet to confirm whether or not recently chosen executives for the Fomena Constituency could also vote.
But a Kumasi High Court Five presided over by Justice Patricia Gyan has on record a piece of information given it at a hearing last Tuesday by a member of the Legal and ADR Committee that a recommendation has been made to the National Leadership of the party to annul the Fomena elections for not meeting laid down procedure.
If the recommendation brought to the notice of the Court is adhered to, then there will be no delegates from that Constituency at the ongoing Regional elections thereby further bringing down the number of the delegates.
The processes leading up to today’s elections have been fraught with some accusations of plans to rig the elections to favour some Candidates.
Some of the Candidates jointly petitioned the national leadership against the use of the Ashanti Regional Coordinating Council as the venue contrary to the fact that, the premises is the official seat for regional political administration. They also raised issue with the delay in the release of the delegates’ register which they call ‘Photo Album’ to allow for scrutiny of the particulars compiled for the elections.
These allegations caused the eventual re-location of the venue to the Baba Yara Stadium a day from the original time of Friday, May 27, 2022.
The release of the Photo Album also brought in its wake new complaints as the leadership of the TESCON, the tertiary institutional network of the party, as well as the Regional Council of Elders accused the compilers of the Register of deliberately replacing particulars of officially delegated representatives with unknown ones to achieve a certain end.
Four Voting Centres have been erected to cater for the four Zones of the Constituencies. This is to ensure that the entire process ends earlier than has been the case in previous similar events.
Security has been tight. Only persons assigned official responsibilities at the event are allowed entry into the Stadium.
The incumbent Regional Chairman, Mr. Bernard Antwi Boasiako affectionately called Chairman Wontumi, the Ashanti Regional Minister, Mr. Simon Osei Mensah, and the Ashanti Caucus in Parliament, Mr. Anyimadu Antwi gave remarks to open the Conference with all of them calling for a peaceful process with the party’s determination to ‘Break The 8’.
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