The Member of Parliament for Tamale Central, Ibrahim Murtala Mohammed, says the National Democratic Congress is shocked at the outcome of the ministerial nominees’ approval vote in parliament.

On Friday, six ministerial nominees were approved by parliament following a shock defeat of the NDC side in what many have described as a ‘betrayal’ of the party’s cause after more than 10 NDC MPs allegedly voted with the ruling party.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, Ibrahim Murtala Mohammed stated that the outcome was really unexpected as there had been broad consultation concerning the NDC caucus’s direction on the ministerial nominees and consensus had been reached.

The NDC had been planning on rejecting the ministerial nominees as a way of forcing the hand of the President to reduce his size of government.

According to the Tamale Central MP, he like many others in the house was optimistic the ministerial nominees’ approval vote was going to fail after realising the NPP side had only 136 members in the house.

“There was broader consultation and the consultation was not only limited within the ranks of our caucus, the leadership engaged us, the party leadership engaged us. If anybody had any reservation, that same person would have raised it but nobody did that.

“And you could sense… I was very confident that we were going to have a 136 based on the outcome of the engagement. And most importantly, the NPP had two of their members not present – Adwoa Safo was not present, Philip Basuah [also] – so we were going to have 136 and per the standing orders of parliament, any voting that has a tie on a matter such as this that voting will be deemed to fail.

“So at that time the NPP was reduced to 136 and we were also 136. So our expectations were very high that if you vote and get 136 the NPP, assuming that all the NPP members voted for the approval and all the NDC members voted for the disapproval, we would have had the nominees removed,” he said.

He said while he may not be able to pinpoint why some party members had defected during the vote, he considers the defeat a failure on the part of the party to keep the government in check.

“The NDC did not fail or we did not let down only the NDC members and our teeming masses, we let down majority of the people of this country because people’s expectation was that if even we got the 136 voting in rejection of the Ministers, we would have sent a signal to this government that the people of this country resent the attempt of government to do what they did,” he said.