Pick a female running-mate for 2028 general elections – Majority Leader challenges NPP

The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) has been urged by Majority Leader Mahama Ayariga to nominate a female candidate for the Party’s running mate post in order to show its support for gender equality.

In addition to being the Member of Parliament for Bawku Central, Mr. Ayariga claimed that the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) had already set an example by selecting Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang as its running mate and then electing her as Ghana’s first female vice president, a first for Ghanaian politics.

“We, the NDC, can only go forward…,” he said amid cheers on the floor of Parliament on Tuesday when responding to the Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin’s comments that President Mahama was not committed to gender equity.

Mr. Ayariga denied the Minority Leader’s claims that the Mahama-led government only nominated a small number of women to ministerial positions.

While the NDC does the same in the Volta area, the Majority Leader urged the NPP to permit female candidates to run unchallenged in “safe seats” in their strongholds, particularly in the Ashanti region.

He thought that in this way, there would be enough female lawmakers in Parliament to allow the president to select his ministers whenever he wanted.

“Now, the Minority Leader has suddenly become a gender champion when as a Majority Leader in government, he could not protect his female MPs’ seats in the last elections and lost most of them….dzi wo fie asem” (focus on your internal issues), he said, triggering another lighthearted cheers from both sides of the house.

Early on, the Minority Leader, Afenyo-Markin, had stated that President Mahama had failed to fulfill his election promise to appoint 30 per cent of females into his Cabinet.

“We have women MPs in the majority side of the House who have the requisite credentials to be ministers but they have been relegated to the background,” Mr Afenyo-Markin stated.