Accra, Sept. 7, GNA - The National Reform Party (NRP) has pulled out of merger talks with the Convention People's party, Great Consolidated Popular Party and People's National Convention. "With that door decisively closed, NRP will concentrate all its energies on its own long-term development around the campaign for a just, productive and tolerant society and against elitist exploitation and oppression in all situations," the Party said in a communiqu=E9 adopted at its Congress at Sunyani on August 28.

The communiqu=E9 signed by Mr Peter Kpordugbe, National Chairman, and released in Accra on Tuesday said based on this; the NRP would challenge the other parties for power in 2008.

The NRP said the emphasis would be on the content of Party activities, "that is, the issues we mobilise around, the social constituencies that we mobilise and the kinds of activism we will promote".

To make this possible, the Party would reorganise its leadership structures and processes, including the restructuring and reconstitution of the National Secretariat, regional and constituency working committees with a view to strengthening initiative, political coherence, social networking, funding, self-reliance and discipline.

"Based on the successful completion of these tasks Congress will convene in March 2005, elect national and regional leaders and re-launch the Party.

"The NRP reaffirmed its 2003 analysis that the NPP, like the NDC before it, had adopted policies that not only concentrated wealth in the hands of the owners of international big business and their local agents, but also continued to deny meaningful economic opportunity and basic social services to the majority of our citizens.

"For the majority of Ghanaians, who remain on the margins of life (peasant farmers, women, students, industrial workers the disabled), the NPP's programmes have failed, as have all the other World Bank/IMF inspired 'Poverty Reduction Strategy Programmes' in Africa and as the NDC 'Structural Adjustment Program' before it."

The NRP said the "Progressives are too disorganised and divided today to mount an effective electoral challenge to NDC and NPP. "Therefore, even though neither the NPP nor the NDC currently command a genuine national consensus, the 2004 elections will almost certainly return one of them to power.

"Predictably and unfortunately, the current election process has degenerated into insults, ethnic and religious tensions, vote-buying, dirty tricks, intimidation and, significantly in the case of NPP primaries, violence."

It said the Congress determined that as an integral element of its reorganisation and re-launch, NRP would be active in the 2004 electoral campaign at both national and constituency levels.

"The party will not field a candidate in the 2004 Presidential elections. Nor will it support any of the other candidates for presidency in the 7 December polls. The Party will field a limited number of candidates in the parliamentary elections."