Deputy Chief Executive Officer in charge of operations at the Youth Employment Agency (YEA), Alhaji Bashiru Ibrahim is fighting off description of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) as an Akan party.
According to him, the NPP traces its roots to the North of the country and therefore, cannot be said to be an Akan party.
He argued that most of the founders of the tradition, which birthed the NPP and those who toiled to keep the tradition alive in the face of political instability, hailed from Northern Ghana.
This, in his view, makes the party a Northern party and not an Akan as being portrayed by especially its opponents.
“If you look at the history of our party, the New Patriotic Party is not for the Southerners. It’s for the people of the Northern part of Ghana. You will agree with that those who sacrificed for us; the Bayifa Karbos, the CK Tedams , the Mumuni Bawumias and all of these people (are from the North)” he noted at the party’s regional youth conference and capacity building in the Upper East Region.
While urging the youth of the party to toil to keep it in power, Alhaji Bashiru called on party’s leadership to teach them about the history of the NPP.
The NPP has, over the years, been tagged as an ethnocentric party and one that does not accommodate minority groups due to utterances by some of its leading members.
The tag appeared to have been reinforced when former Vice-President, Alhaji Aliu Mahama was rejected in his bid to lead the party in the 2008 Elections.
However, in recent times, the party has been attempting to purge itself of such negative tags.
This, some of its members believe, can inly be achieved if it elect someone from the North as its leader.
