The Member of Parliament (MP) for Kwesimintsim in the Western Region, Dr Prince Hamid Armah, has charged members of the Tertiary Students Confederacy (TESCON) of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) to start work now if they want to see the party break the famous eight-year cycle of parties in government.
Dr Armah, who is also the Deputy Chair of the Parliament’s Education Committee, said elections are not only lost in election years but in the months and years preceding it.
“Between now and December 2024, all we do must be geared towards breaking the eight. It won’t be easy but it can be done. So TESCON members must work extra hard to protect and project the government’s achievements and reassure our more restless colleagues who do not see what we are doing to fix the country,” Dr Armah told members of the Accra Technical University chapter of TESCON during a handing over and freshers’ orientation ceremony on Thursday.
He was also quick to add that leadership must focus on assisting the President to achieve the mandate and campaign promises rather than engaging in premature leadership squabbles that will only divide the party.
The governing NPP is determined to make history by retaining power in the 2024 election. It will be the first time in Ghana’s Fourth Republican dispensation that a government will win three successive elections.
The two leading political parties – the National Democratic Congress and the NPP- have both won two elections but failed to break the eight-year jinx, something the NPP will attempt to do in 2024. That will not come easy and Dr Armah is well aware of that.
“If we succumb to the myth of the eight-year cycle, we will fail the Ghanaian people, ourselves and jeopardise our future as a nation,” he said in his speech at the event which was under the theme: ‘The role of TESCON in consolidating our gains to break the eight.’
Dr Armah, who is himself a former TESCON Secretary for the University of Education, Winneba chapter of the organisation, said a lot depends on the student wing if the party will break the jinx.
He said TESCON was founded at a time when the NPP and its ideology were under threat in the early part of the Fourth Republic but it took hard work and sacrifice from TESCON members to mobilise across tertiary campuses to help the NPP win power in the 2000 elections.
Since then TESCON has played a pivotal role when the party is in and out of power, Dr Armah stated. Chronicling the various roles TESCON played ahead of the 2000 election, 2012 election petition, 2016 and 2020 elections, the former Director-General of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment said TESCON has become an “invaluable part of the party’s set up, mobilising, spreading our message, providing feedback and working in various ways to keep the party’s mission of winning elections and changing Ghana for the better on course.”
He said the stakes in 2024 are even higher because the party cannot allow the successes it has chalked to be destroyed by the NDC. “Our progress as a nation has been interrupted by the NDC’s tenures in office. The gains under Kufuor were ruined by the Mills-Mahama administrations. Now we have returned to do even better,” he said, adding that, “right now the party is reorganising from the ground up. TESCON members must take a keen interest in the process, participate and where possible, take up positions themselves to make the party stronger.”
