Is it a group or a party within a party?

New Generation Party (NGP) is being rumoured to be taking shape within the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP). An exasperated senior party officer yesterday told ADM that “with all these problems, we continue to play ostrich”.

The official, asking for strict anonymity told ADM that “we have not opened nominations and look at what is happening – everybody wants to be president, and no one is talking about how we can build the party to meet the real challenges.” The official was reacting to questions about the so-called New Generation Party which is said to have the blessing of some other high ups within the party.

The aims and objectives of the “party” are not yet very clear, but an individual claiming to have links with some of the brains behind it revealed to an ADM source that “the intention is to put up a candidate and running mate”. The NPP seems to be tying its fortunes in the elections of 2008 to the mast of open-ended presidential aspirations – obviously playing up its internal democracy credentials for better for worse. The number of presidential aspirants keeps rising and the party is fast becoming something of an object of derision for that reason.

In opposition, the NPP was focused enough to break the jinx of three decades of its antecedents being in the political wilderness, but in power it seems to be tying itself in the knots that would lead it back to the wilderness. The official who spoke to ADM criticized the number of “Friends” springing up within the party and described them as possible sources of party destabilization.

ADM’s own investigations on whether there is a strategic plan on succession has drawn blanks, revealing only remarks here and there about how the party’s constitution has taken care of it and individual preferences for this or that aspirant. As to whether the party has a grand strategy on managing the passing of the baton from a successful presidential two terms to a successor, nothing like that exists, creating room for this platoon of presidential aspirants and an internal movement within the party that could destabilize it altogether.

ADM investigations continue…