The exercise forms part of the recommendations from the Professor Kwesi Botchwey Committee that was tasked to investigate the party’s 2016 election defeat.

Exercise on course

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Graphic at the party’s Adabraka headquarters in Accra yesterday, Mr Adams said even though the exercise started with some challenges, they had been addressed.

Mr Adams said so far, the exercise had been going on smoothly and expressed the hope that more people would turn up to register.

Touching on concerns raised by some members of the party that some presidential aspirants were encouraging their favourites to register and vie for executive positions at the branch, constituency and regional levels in order to establish a support base for the presidential primary, Mr Adams said he had no problem with that as far as those who registered were party members.

He, however, explained that if it turned out that those who registered were not party members, then that would be an issue.

He said the Constituency and the Regional Monitoring Teams would soon move to the constituencies and regions to assess the exercise.

Background

The NDC embarked on a re-organisation and re-registration of members at the branch level as part of the implementation of the Prof. Kwesi Botchwey Committee’s report, and also to ensure unity and cohesion at the grassroots level as recommended by the committee.

Members were required to re-register at their branches where they were known to the executives to ensure that those whose names got into the register were genuine members of the party who had duly paid their dues to raise funds for the party.

The manual re-registration would later be migrated onto a biometric register, which is intended to create greater and broader participation in the party’s internal election processes which had certain challenges that did not inure to the benefit of the party; hence the decision to undertake a new registration exercise to create a more credible and acceptable database for the party.

After the branches, constituencies, regional and national re-organisation, the party will elect its national officers, after which the stage will be set to elect the flag bearer for the 2020 election.

The branch re-organisation and re-registration had become necessary because it was obvious that during the last election, the branches did not function as they ought to have done, hence the need for the re-organisation.