A Political Science lecturer of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Dr. Kwasi Amakye Boateng, has said the special delegates’ conference of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) lacked the tenets of a democratic exercise and can therefore not classify it as one.
According to him, the decentralised nature of the process compromised the integrity of the elections, giving room for people to be coerced to do things outside their will.
Dr. Amakye Boateng says delegates were pressured to vote in a certain direction, the reason people had to take shots of how they voted and show it in public.
Speaking on TV3’s New Day with Roland Walker Wednesday, September 27, 2023, the political scientist recounted an incident he witnessed in KNUST where someone who displayed his vote was nearly beaten but for the intervention of the police.
His reaction comes on the back of concerns raised by Alan John Kyerematen before his resignation from the NPP to declare his intention to contest as an independent candidate in the 2024 presidential election.
“If you examine the processes that brought out these five people following the super delegates’ [conference] I’ll not call that a democratic process. The playing field was not even. I cite one major case to support my position; the decentralized nature of the processes made it easier for coercion to be applied and my argument…key members, and these were elites in the party, people who were not support to be prone to pressure, coercion but they felt so pressured that after voting, they had to take a picture of how they voted and then they came out openly to show it,” he stated.
He reemphasised that, “giving the numbers involved, it was possible for that pressure to be applied and to tell how many people voted for candidate A or B” adding that, “I conclude that anybody who took a picture of how he/she voted and came out to show it was under coercion to do that.”
“Because of this, it was not what I called a democratic election because it was not necessarily able to let individuals exercise their votes privately, secretly; that element was compromised,” he concluded.
