As the New Patriotic Party (NPP) prepares for critical internal elections beginning with polling station executive elections on December 6, 2025, and culminating in the flagbearer election on January 31, 2026, the National Council’s chosen top-down approach has come under scrutiny. Critics claim it sidelines the grassroots and favours certain candidates. But in truth, this is not a tactic for control, it is a strategy for survival.
Following our painful 2024 electoral defeat, the party stands at a crossroads. What we need now is not factional noise, but clear-headed reorganization. The top-down method is our strategic lifeline. Here are ten compelling reasons why:
1. Unity Through Centralized Discipline
The 2024 post-mortem revealed catastrophic internal divisions and poor communication. A top-down rebuild enforces structural discipline, aligning local and national objectives under one cohesive vision, vital when restoring public trust.
2. Prevents Grassroots Hijacking
Bottom-up sequencing has often enabled aspirants to manipulate polling station elections to capture the party machinery. The current approach ensures neutral grounds are set before interest groups entrench themselves.
3. Timely Flagbearer Selection Avoids Paralysis
Delaying flagbearer elections until after all lower-tier structures are rebuilt wastes valuable time. We need a clear leader now, to rally support and focus messaging ahead of 2028.
4. Reduces Factional Infiltration Below
Early flagbearer selection helps minimize factional competition at the grassroots. Once the national picture is clear, internal rivalries at lower levels are less intense and more focused on unity.
5. Faster Recovery, Smoother Mobilization
The top-down model allows national leaders to begin early grassroots outreach, accelerating recovery, fundraising, and voter re-engagement across constituencies.
6. Avoids Post-Election Confusion
In previous cycles, fragmented structures led to parallel loyalty lines. Starting from the top clarifies direction, reduces confusion, and simplifies communication.
7. Stronger Internal Monitoring
With leadership in place at the top, lower-tier elections can be fairly monitored, ensuring transparency, fairness, and accountability.
8. Draws from Global Best Practices
Globally, successful parties like the UK’s Conservative Party, India’s BJP, South Africa’s ANC, and the U.S. Democrats often set national leadership before cascading down to local reorganization, ensuring cohesion and message consistency.
9. Reflects Urgency, Not Control
This is a time-sensitive restructuring and not a power grab. Ghana’s political landscape moves fast; we must be ready with leadership and direction by mid-2026 if we are to be competitive in 2028.
10. It Encourages Focused Reforms, Not Opportunism
By clarifying national leadership first, we reduce internal lobbying and shift the focus to policy, performance, and reform, not patronage and positions.
Debunking the “Favouritism” Myth
Let’s be unequivocal, this approach favours no individual, it rather favours the party’s future. The sequencing (Polling Stations to Flagbearer and then Electoral Area Coordinators, Constituency, Regional and National) creates natural firebreaks against manipulation because no single candidate can dominate all tiers at once and it equally brings early clarity which limits chaos and entrenched divisions.
Critics calling for a bottom-up approach forget that our 2024 defeat was rooted in the very grassroots disunity they now seek to romanticize. Reform must begin at the root but only after the trunk has been strengthened.
Conclusion: Medicine Before Dessert
This top-down strategy may be bitter medicine, but it is necessary to save the patient. Like pruning a storm-shattered tree to save its core, we must elect our flagbearer early and rebuild our structures around a revitalized national identity.
By the time we hold our polling station elections in December, our members will see that this isn’t about imposition, it’s about direction. It’s about creating a party ready not just to contest, but to win and to govern with renewed purpose. The elephant rises fastest when the herd moves as one. Let’s move together.
Fuseini Abdul-Fatawu
Former Polling Station Secretary, Sissala East Constituency
