Legal practitioner and public affairs commentator Austin Kwabena Brako-Powers says Kojo Bamba was eligible to contest the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) internal elections because his previous conviction did not involve an offence covered by the relevant disqualification provisions.
Mr Brako-Powers said the central issue was not simply whether Mr Bamba had been convicted, but the nature of the offence and whether it belonged to a category that could legally prevent him from standing for election.
Mr Bamba was recently elected First National Vice Chairman of the NPP at the party’s National Delegates Conference, where he defeated several candidates for the position.
The result has led to controversy, with critics arguing that his previous conviction should have made him ineligible to contest for an executive role within the party.
Mr Brako-Powers dismissed that interpretation, saying the conviction related to the 2017 incident involving members of the Delta Force at the Ashanti Regional Coordinating Council. The members were prosecuted and convicted over offences connected to the incident.
He said the case should be assessed according to the specific offence for which Mr Bamba was convicted, rather than the political circumstances surrounding it.
According to Mr Brako-Powers, the offence was not one involving fraud, dishonesty, moral turpitude, high treason or the security of the State. On that basis, he argued that it did not fall within the types of offences that would trigger disqualification.
He also warned against referring to Mr Bamba only as an “ex-convict” and then assuming that description alone made him ineligible to contest the NPP election.
“A conviction is not automatically synonymous with disqualification,” he said.
Mr Brako-Powers further drew a distinction between qualification for an internal position in a political party and eligibility to contest public office under the 1992 Constitution.
He referred to Article 94(2)(c), which sets out specific circumstances in which a person can be disqualified from being elected as a Member of Parliament.
Those constitutional restrictions, he said, should not be applied automatically to an internal NPP election. Instead, the NPP Constitution must be examined to establish whether the conviction falls within any provision preventing a member from holding an executive position.
Mr Brako-Powers maintained that, based on the facts of Mr Bamba’s conviction, there was no legal justification for classifying it as one of the offences covered by the applicable disqualification rules.
He said the dispute should therefore be determined by examining the actual conviction and the precise wording of the NPP Constitution, rather than relying solely on the label of “convict”.
