The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) has warned that it will sanction any failed presidential and parliamentary aspirant who attempts to go independent after its primaries.

According to the party, all the aspirants have signed an undertaking committing themselves to support the eventual winner in both the presidential and parliamentary primaries.

Deputy General Secretary of the NPP, Haruna Mohammed therefore said the party reserves the right to restrain any aspirant who will decide otherwise and apply the appropriate sanctions.

“These rules are designed before we open nominations so at the time of designing these rules, there was no aspirant and there was no way we could consult a non-existing aspirant.”

“This is a rule that the party has set, and if you know that when you lose you’ll contest as independent then you don’t pick the form or you don’t return the form, you wait until it’s time for independents to contest.”

“The sanctions are inside the rules, if you go against it, we will take you on because this is an agreement you have signed and the party will take the best decision,” he said.

The party has opened nominations for parliamentary primaries in orphan constituencies across the country, and has extended a golden handshake to the Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Andrew Asiamah Amoako for omitting Fomena from the orphan constituencies open for contest. 

The Deputy General Secretary of the NPP told Joy News that the Fomena MP, though independent legislator, does business with the party in parliament.

Therefore, the Fomena constituency has been classified under those with sitting Members of Parliament and it will be opened when the party decides to conduct primaries for such constituencies.

“Everybody knows that Fomena is doing business with us so it has a different way of being treated just like the sitting Members of Parliament.”

“Even though the Fomena MP is an independent one, he’s still doing business with us, he votes with us, he takes decisions with us.”

“The point is, we’re doing for orphans and Fomena is doing business with us in parliament so the same way we don’t open for our sitting Members of Parliament, we would wait till we get there, but Fomena is doing business with us in parliament,” he explained.