Director of Research and Innovation at KsTU, Professor Smart Sarpong has said his research has challenged the assumption that access to money and resources is the dominant consideration for NPP delegates ahead of the party’s national executive elections.
According to him delegates he spoke to offered a different understanding of what it means for a candidate to be “resourceful”.
He said discussions about money and mobilisation were prominent before his research began, but the issue appeared to lose some importance when researchers engaged directly with delegates.
“I don’t know, before I started the survey on the 10th of September, people were talking about resources, mobilisation, all those things surprisingly began to fall when you speak to the delegates,” Professor Sarpong said on Joy News.
He recalled one delegate challenging the idea that an individual candidate’s personal wealth should automatically make that person attractive to the party.
“One delegate tells me, do you know what it means? One tree can become a bush. Can one tree ever?” he recounted.
Professor Sarpong said the delegate’s point was that describing a candidate as financially resourceful did not necessarily mean that the individual could personally finance an entire political party.
“So if you say the chairman is resourceful or has money, are you there for suggestion that that one person, he’s asking me, can that one person fund a party?” he said.
He added that the finding showed that delegates could have a different interpretation of financial strength from the one commonly used in public discussions about internal party elections.
“The understanding of who has resources even differ from how we sometimes see it,” he said.
The finding comes as the NPP prepares for its national executive elections on October 3, 2026, with four candidates contesting the National Chairman position and several others contesting the remaining executive positions.
