The Member of Parliament for Yendi, Farouk Aliu-Mahama, has said that Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia should be the flagbearer of his party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

Being a presidential or parliamentary candidate of a party, he believes, should not be based on the number of years one has been a member of the party.

He said that people saying it is the turn of Alan Kyerematen to be the flagbearer of the NPP are wrong because there were people on the scene before him, including Dr. Kofi Konadu Apraku, who contested with ex-President John Agyekum Kufour.

Aliu-Mahama, who made these remarks in a JoyNews interview monitored by GhanaWeb on Sunday, added that the vice president over the past few years has proven that he has the capacity and the competence to transform Ghana.

“My support for Dr. Bawumia is not because my late father wanted to see him at some point. I have seen the vice president, within the shortest possible time, become a force to reckon with in this country.

“He has moved the country as a vice president; he has done a lot. He has the vision to do more with the support of the president and has carried himself to the admiration of everybody; he is very competent.

“The vice president at least can lead Ghana to the promise land… Dr. Bawumia is somebody who stands tall, in the last 16 years, everything is about Bawumia. Even those who don’t like Bawumia are speaking about him,” he said.

He warned the party to be careful with how it handles the upcoming presidential primaries to ensure that it does not divide the party as it did in 2008, which led to the party losing the election.

He added that even though all the persons who have expressed interest in contesting in the party’s flagbearership race are competent, only one person can emerge as the winner.

Meanwhile, the vice president has been projected to be the flagbearer of the NPP in a recent study co-conducted by Outcomes International Ghana and the Centre for Sustainable African Development Initiatives (C-SADI) UK.

According to the survey, the most popular candidate for the New Patriotic Party flagbearer position in all 16 regions of Ghana is the vice president.

In all, the survey got responses from around 197,000 NPP polling station executives (PSEs) in all the regions.

“Data was obtained mainly through computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) technology between 15th November 2022 and 15th December 2022. Based on 95% confidence level and 2% margin of error a sample size of 6000 PSEs was used. However, 5641 PSEs were successfully interviewed (response rate of 94%) from all 96 constituencies.

“Greater Accra region had the highest number of PSEs interviewed with 1142 PSEs followed by the Ashanti region with 869 PSEs corresponding to 20.2% and 15.4% respectively. More than half of PSE’s who participated in the survey were Akan (54% [n=3056 PSEs]), and 46% (n=2585 PSEs) were non-Akan. In terms of religious distribution, 78% of the PSEs were Christian whilst 20.6% were Muslim,” the report stated.

IB/SEA