Apaak: NPP Leaders Giving Credibility To ‘Akan’ Tag

Presidential staffer, Dr. Clement Apaak has criticised the leadership of the New Patriotic Party for endlessly engaging itself in activities that tag the party as being ethnocentric.

Last week the Ashanti region branch of the opposition party organised a massive demonstration dubbed “Y’ay3 d3n” in the capital, Kumasi, to highlight their suffering as a result of the worsening economic condition coupled with erratic power outages.

Some party functionaries – including parliamentarians- accused government of neglecting people of the region which is the stronghold of the opposition party. They claimed, for instance, ongoing load shedding, which is a national exercise, has been intensified in the region purposefully to ‘punish’ residents there for not voting the president, John Mahama in the 2012 elections.

But speaking Saturday on Joy FM’s weekly news analysis programme, Newsfile, Dr. Apaak accused the NPP leadership – including the MPs – of deliberately using the protest march to propagate their own agenda.

“They organised the demonstration under this pretext…and used this allegation to make vicious statements against the government,” Dr. Apaak noted.

According to him, if the MPs mean well they would have raised concerns regarding the so-called intensified power rationing in the region on the floor of Parliament.

“…you come under the pretext of protesting an issue that is a national issue which is being worked on and then you mount the platform [to] totally use very vitriolic language…and cast all kinds of aspersions against the president…

“They must wake up to reality and stop providing the context for people to continue to see their party as a party that draws its base from a particular ethnic enclave,” he said.