Every serious institution must make peace with the reality of human error. Governance whether political or corporate, demands flexibility, and good leadership often means knowing when to reverse course. The problem is not the correction. The problem is when correction becomes the default mode of operation. When reversals, amendments, clarifications, and supplementary notices stop being responses to exceptional circumstances and start being the rhythm of normal business, something far more troubling than error has taken root.
That is precisely the conversation the New Patriotic Party must now summon the courage to have honestly, and without the usual political instinct to protect its own.
The subject is the Office of the General Secretary.
Over the past four years, a pattern has quietly but unmistakably established itself. Timetables announced, then revised. Guidelines circulated, then clarified within hours. Electoral procedures were issued, then supplemented after confusion spread. Internal directives amended following backlash sometimes constitutional, sometimes operational, sometimes simply the result of stakeholders learning about decisions they should have shaped. Taken individually, each incident might be explained away as the natural friction of complex institutional management. Taken together, they reveal something the party can no longer afford to ignore.
The concern is not that errors occurred. The concern is the stubborn frequency with which they keep occurring.
The publicly traceable record makes reading uncomfortable.
On 3 April 2023, the party released timelines for presidential and parliamentary primaries. Almost immediately, concerns surfaced scheduling conflicts, vetting ambiguities, operational impracticalities. The Secretariat revised the timetable. Barely two months later, between 12 and 13 June 2023, presidential and orphan constituency primary timelines had to be adjusted again, reportedly following an emergency Steering Committee meeting convened to address logistical and administrative complications that had somehow survived the original planning process.
Throughout the middle and latter months of 2023, parliamentary primary guidelines were generating active confusion across multiple constituencies over nomination windows, eligibility interpretations, orphan constituency arrangements. Supplementary directives had to be deployed to restore order that should never have been disrupted in the first place.
In 2024, further internal directives on campaign conduct and constituency election administration provoked fresh procedural questions about electoral college composition and the coordination between national and local structures. Again, follow-up communications arrived to clean up what the original communications had left in disarray.
On 18 February 2026, timelines for overseas and regional elections were announced as part of the party’s reorganisation exercise. Implementation concerns from members of our overseas and other stakeholders followed. “Revised guidelines followed the revised guidelines.”
And the amended constitution launched on 3 December 2025 itself partly an institutional acknowledgement of accumulated grievances over exclusion, weak communication, voter disengagement, and organizational frustration in the aftermath of the 2024 electoral defeat arrived as yet another corrective layer on a structure that has been corrected too many times already.
The most recent addition to this catalogue of avoidable embarrassments involves the announcement of the appointments committee. The Secretariat released the list of committee members to the public only for Justin Kodua to subsequently issue a press release appealing for patience and clarifying that the published list was not exhaustive. Members were asked, in essence, to disregard the incompleteness of official communication that should never have been released in that condition.
The question this episode demands is a simple one: why the haste? If the list of policy committee members was not yet complete, what institutional compulsion drove the decision to publish it prematurely rather than wait until the full composition could be announced with the authority and finality that such appointments deserve? The answer, for those paying attention, is already visible in the pattern. There was no prior conversation with national leadership about this announcement. None. The subsequent press release clarifying that the list was incomplete was not a planned addendum it was a reactionary scramble, the all-too-familiar signature of a Secretariat that announces first and consults later. The backlash that followed was not a surprise. It was a consequence. And it was entirely avoidable.
Patterns, unlike isolated incidents, do not apologize for themselves.
A political party is not merely an electoral machine to be wound up at election time. It is an institution and institutions are sustained not by popularity alone but by order, predictability, and the quiet confidence that comes from procedural credibility. The Office of the General Secretary is the administrative engine room of that institution. It is where preparation meets execution. It is where stakeholders expect discipline before decisions, not explanations after them.
Which is why many party faithful are now asking questions they would rather not be asking.
Why do major announcements repeatedly emerge in forms that cannot survive their first week? Why do key stakeholders appear to learn about decisions at the same moment as the general public or worse, after it? Why has the Secretariat cultivated what looks increasingly like a reactive posture in an office that should, by its very nature, be anticipatory?
And the question beneath those questions: at what point does institutional accountability become not just appropriate, but necessary?
These are not the questions of disgruntled factionalists looking for ammunition. They are the questions of people who understand what institutions require to survive.
The corporate parallel, though imperfect, is instructive precisely because it strips away the political insulation we so readily afford elected officers. If the General Secretary were the Chief Executive of a significant organisation, the board would not be debating patience at this stage. They would be debating performance management. No serious board of directors tolerates a pattern in which strategic communications require revision shortly after release, in which operational frameworks cause confusion in the very structures they were designed to govern, in which the corrective notice has become more reliable than the original one. Four years of recurring reversals would not be attributed to complexity. They would be attributed to the executive responsible for preventing them.
This is not a harsh standard. It is simply the standard that applies everywhere accountability exists.
Politics, however, creates a peculiar insulation around its officers. Once elected, leaders can become quietly shielded from the performance expectations that govern every other serious institution. The election won through genuine campaigning, real effort, and genuine constituency support gradually transforms in institutional imagination from a mandate for performance into a warrant against scrutiny. Seniority, loyalty networks, and the organizational culture of factional gratitude all conspire to protect incumbency from the evaluative gaze it should be inviting.
But election into office was never meant to be a certificate of immunity. It was meant to be the beginning of accountability, not the end of it.
The party’s internal governance frameworks were not written as ceremonial decoration. They exist to protect the organization from exactly this kind of sustained administrative drift the gradual normalization of dysfunction, the slow erosion of standards, the institutional amnesia that eventually forgets what competence was supposed to look like.
There are those who will say that repeated mistakes do not warrant drastic consequences. That argument is not entirely without merit. Perfection is an unreasonable standard, and punishing every error would make governance impossible. But that argument only holds if the mistakes are genuinely isolated. When errors become recurrent, systemic, and predictable when the pattern is more reliable than the performance the question is no longer whether individual incidents warrant sanction. The question is whether the party’s corrective mechanisms are functioning at all, and whether they are being applied with the same consistency to the Secretariat as they would be to any other institutional actor.
The deeper danger, in truth, is not even the mistakes themselves.
It is normalization.
Normalization is the quiet catastrophe of institutional life. It does not announce itself. It simply accumulates. At some point, members stop being surprised that timetables change. They stop being troubled by supplementary clarifications. They stop expecting that the first announcement will be the final one. And when that expectation is abandoned, something essential leaves the institution not with a dramatic rupture, but with a shrug.
When confidence in process erodes, factionalism does not need an invitation. It finds its own door.
The NPP has historically defined itself in meaningful part by its commitment to institutionalism, constitutionalism, and procedural governance. That identity is not an accident. It was forged through deliberate choices, deliberate culture, and deliberate insistence that the party was something more durable than any individual personality. That tradition is worth defending and it is worth defending most urgently when defending it requires pointing the mirror inward.
A Secretariat should arrive at the table having already done the consultation, the stress-testing, and the scenario planning. It should release directives that hold. It should announce timetables that survive the week. It should be the institution’s guarantee of order not the recurring origin points of its disorder.
The delegates, chapter officers, and grassroots members of this party deserve no less. They have invested their energy, their loyalty, and in many cases their livelihoods in an organization that they need to trust. That trust is not a given. It is earned through every communication, every timetable, every directive that does exactly what it was designed to do and does not require a follow-up notice to explain what it actually meant.
This moment calls for reflection rather than defensiveness, and for institutional honesty rather than political solidarity of the wrong kind.
It is also important to be precise about what this record actually represents. The timeline of reversals documented here damning as it constitutes only a fraction of what exists. These are the publicly traceable incidents, the ones that broke surface and left documentary evidence. They are drawn from a far larger and denser dossier of daily infractions: administrative missteps, communication failures, internal contradictions, and procedural lapses that never made it into public discourse but are known, felt, and quietly catalogued by those who work within and alongside the party’s structures. If the visible portion of this record is sufficient to give any serious person pause, the weight of what lies beneath it should settle the question entirely.
That question stated plainly is this: what business does Justin Kodua Frimpong have drawing any closer to the Secretariat, let alone nursing the ambition of an additional term in an office whose current tenure he has not yet been able to justify?
The documented pattern alone disqualifies the ambition. A leader who has spent four years in reactive mode correcting, clarifying, revising, and supplementing decisions that should have been sound from the moment they were made has not demonstrated the administrative fitness the office demands. To reward that record with renewal would not be loyalty. It would be institutional negligence dressed up as grace.
The NPP is at a crossroads that demands more than sentiment. It demands judgment.
And so, the verdict, arrived not in malice but in the cold clarity that institutions occasionally require, is straightforward: Kodua must go. The only question that remains and it is a question he alone can answer is whether he goes in peace, with the dignity of a man who reads the room and exits on his own terms, or in pieces, carried out by the weight of a record that will only grow heavier the longer it is allowed to accumulate.
Because the ultimate question facing the NPP is not really about the General Secretary. It is about what the party is prepared to tolerate, and what it is prepared to demand.
Will the NPP reinforce a culture of administrative excellence, one that rewards preparation, consultation, and deliberate execution? Or will it quietly accept a cycle in which directives are routinely rescued by corrections, and original decisions are routinely subordinated to afterthought revisions?
Institutions rarely collapse spectacularly. They decline through the slow tolerance of things that should not have been tolerated small acceptances that grow, over time, into institutional character.
The recurring corrections from the Office of the General Secretary should trouble every serious member of this party not because perfection is owed to anyone, but because competence is owed to everyone.
And competence, at this point, demands a new custodian. So, until Kodua is out of office, I have made a firm decision not to join my overseas party members, especially here in UK because the General Secretary has no respect for members but treats them with disdain.
Michael Amponsah Asabre – PhD, Biostatistics
Caddington, Luton
United Kingdom
