Dr Bernard Oko Boye lost the Ledzokuku seat in the 2020 polls because the critical role he played as a deputy health minister in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic angered his own constituents within the Teshie enclave since it robbed them of the opportunity to revel in their annual ‘Kpaa Shimo’ event, which is a major source of communal entertain for the indigenes in that part of the Greater Accra Region, the governing New Patriotic Party’s Regional Chairman Divine Otoo Agorhom has said.

Dr Boye’s seat was one of seven seats lost by the NPP in the region during the last general elections.

The party held 21 seats ahead of the polls but ended up with only 14.

On the other hand, the biggest opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) entered the race with 13 seats and emerged with seven more, increasing its strength to 20 in the region.

Speaking in an interview with CTV’s Bintu Saana about the NPP’s fortunes in the region, Mr Agorhom said, “Our analyses don’t show we will get back all the seats we lost from the 21 we had but we are very likely to recover to 19 or 20”.

“You’ll be making realistic projections. We were looking at 24 seats before the 2020 elections but it was conditioned on our ability to maintain our hold on the 21 that we were having he said.

“We were able to get one of the seats we projected prior to the elections which wasn’t our seat at the time but what affected us is that we lost most of the seats that we were already holding”, he bemoaned.

Asked if the party lost focus on those seats, Mr Agorhom said: “We didn’t take our eyes off those seats we held”, but admitted: “It was difficult to hold our own because most of our MPs were ministers coupled with the fact that we couldn’t get our primaries done early”.

Additionally, he said the declaration of the voting day as a holiday negatively affected the NPP’s fortunes.

In his view, however, the tides will turn in the party’s favour in the next general elections.

“If you analyse the trend in constituencies like Krowor, Ledzokuku, La, to a large extent, hardly do you get one MP going twice. Historically, these are swing constituencies”, he observed.

"In Ledzokuku, Dr Oko Boye’s constituency, everybody would agree that he was one of the most hardworking MPs we got but for whatever reasons, he was voted out. Now, if you engage people within his constituency, you can see that most people are beginning to align or move toward him”, he revealed.

“He [Oko Boye] really worked very very hard. There was a particular road in the constituency that all the constituents were complaining about and wanted to be fixed. Oko Boye harassed the president with that road until it got fixed. I even drove on it this morning to your studios. So, one would have expected that Oko Boye would have won his re-election bid easily but such hard work, as a member of parliament versus meeting the personal expectations of your constituents, are two different things”, Mr Agorhom pointed out.

He said: “Ledzokuku is not really about the money you give to the constituents, so, he [Oko Boye] knew this and he tried as much as possible to engage them in social activities but one key thing that affected Oko Boye was his fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, which clashed with a very popular source of communal entertainment for the people of Teshie known as ‘Kpaa Shimo’”.

MR Agorhom explained that the restrictions instituted on public gathering as a result of the COVID pandemic, coupled with the “key” role played in that regard by their own MP, Dr Oko Boye, in his capacity as Deputy Minister of Health, got the people of Teshie “extremely pained”, “so, they decided to punish him” at the polls.

“But should he decide to go again, looking at what I’m seeing on the ground, things could go in his favour”, Mr Agorhom said.