Gabby Otchere-Darko
On Tuesday, Namibia’s Vice President, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, was declared the winner of last week’s presidential election with 57% of the vote. It was hailed as the toughest test yet of the popularity of the ruling SWAPO party. The ruling party was falsely predicted to lose heavily in the urbanised Khomas Region, where the social media campaign against it was most frighteningly intense. But the Vice President ended up winning nine out of the 10 seats there, including John Pandeni Constituency, only losing Windhoek East to the main opposition leader, Panduleni Itula.
Here in Ghana, with the general election coming up this Saturday, several pundits believe the presidential race remains too close to call. Yet, there is also a recognition that the momentum appears to be clearly on the side of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, making his camp more upbeat.
On the parliamentary side, even the main opposition National Democratic Congress concedes privately that the ruling party is more likely to win the majority of seats. I will repeat my earlier point last week that the winner on Saturday is more likely to be determined by the greater efficacy of his party’s D-Day strategy, particularly in identifying and mobilising their supporters to the polling stations to vote.
If the elections were held a year ago, former President John Mahama would have won by a clear margin, perhaps. Even six months ago he was still ahead, but not enough to cross. It seems to me that a combination of the weight of his own baggage, the broader albeit late recognition of the work done by Akufo-Addo and the formidability of the ruling party’s new presidential candidate have all contributed to the revision of notes.
Apart from currency depreciation where NDC’s previous eight years compete well against NPP’s current eight (NDC’s 71% to NPP’s 71.75% as at Tuesday’s rate of GH¢15.12 to $1) , former President John Mahama will struggle to mention one area where NDC performed better than the NPP, if we measure both parties’ achievements from 2009 to 2024. Ghanaians are now able to assess that on every aspect of government delivery, apart from the cost of living crisis (the severest the world has seen in 90 years), the NPP can claim with confidence that they have done much better in these eight years than what the NDC managed to achieve under their last eight years.
The list is tall, including: the construction of roads, bridges and interchanges, railway development, nationwide access to education and health, actual spending on social welfare, agriculture, anti-corruption institutions, the police and the military, support for farmers, access to justice, investments in decentralisation, investments and incentives for industrialisation and digitalisation.
In a close race such as this, there is still time for the undecided or the softly decided voters to tilt the balance. It is obvious, from the trend of all the polls that, even for many of those who thought their minds were made up, they have looked back and assessed the eight-year cycle that the two major parties have been granted, almost as of right, since 1992 and weighed it against the options before us.
Should we be opting for change even when we are not sure that the person we are changing for has himself changed for the better? Are we to change because eight years are up or because we have identified which candidate we can actually trust to bring real change to Ghana?
If Saturday’s polls are to be based purely on performance, then it is not difficult to conclude that the New Patriotic Party has done more for Ghana than the NDC. Hard work pays. The returns from Akufo-Addo’s habit of working in his office until 1:00am every day are there for all to see. John Mahama admitted, as President, he would come to the office at 11am and leave to go home by 4pm. In his first term, Akufo-Addo had 84 Cabinet sittings, where every policy or programme was scrutinised, debated and approved. In his second term, Akufo-Addo has presided over 81 cabinet meetings so far. President Mahama had 46 cabinet meetings in his entire four years. We saw the outcome. Programmes of various ministries, departments and agencies were not properly coordinated for the benefit of the state.
The NPP could not have predicted certain events, but their good management of most of such events is what has yielded the results we see, including the current economic recovery. Competent economic management is best tested when there is a crisis. It is why, in spite of the challenges, including loan-funded projects that had to stop after 2022, Akufo-Addo is still able to be going around with scissors in hand commissioning project after project.
No government in the history of our nation has been able to commission 80 school buildings on the same day across the country as we saw a few weeks ago. No government, until Akufo-Addo’s, had the courage to undertake 111 major hospital projects in over 101 districts and seven regions across the country, simultaneously. Will a Mahama government find the $1.4 billion needed to complete Agenda 111 or find an excuse to focus on his own new contracts of priority if elected?
This NPP government handled both a major debt restructuring crisis and currency depreciation sequence without once getting us to queue for petrol or suffer shortage of drugs, or other essential items. They have managed the power situation better with an even more challenging economic situation. All government workers are paid and on time. It calls for competence to manage such a major crisis as if you were in normal times. It should be recognised that the world has just gone through the harshest economic challenges for over several decades. Before the crisis of 2020-2023, nothing close to it had been endured by Ghanaians throughout the 4th Republic. In 2014, when the cedi became the worst currency in the world, we could not find petrol at our filling stations!
It may be a stretch, but voters will do well to imagine how both President John Mahama and Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia would have handled it, if either of them had been in Akufo-Addo’s position over the period that some very tough leadership decisions had to be made. Would you have trusted Mahama better than Bawumia?
Based on what we know of John Mahama as President, what would he have done if he was the one faced with the option to protect or ignore saving the funds of the 4.6 million depositors and 94,000 investors, who had become victims of the collapsing financial institutions? Would he have had the mettle and fellow feeling to absorb the GH¢26 billion cost of the financial sector cleaning up exercise or would he have done a DKM kind of no-show on them?
How would President Mahama have handled the COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented health and socio-economic cost that came with it? How would he have dealt with the global consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war, namely the supply chain disruptions and high inflation? How would he have navigated the unprecedented run on government bonds, as government’s spending plans were thrown out by unbending opposition MPs and foreign bondholders rushed to cash out in dollars on their cedi bonds?
And, perhaps even more poignantly, how would the presidency under John Mahama have handled this hung parliament with a Speaker from the main opposition party, and a Minority caucus determined to disrupt government business?
Finally, how would he have navigated Ghana out of the severe economic crisis that we have faced, precipitated by factors beyond our borders and made worse by our own domestic vulnerabilities? Would he have managed them to this point where year-on-year growth of the economy for this election year, 2024, is twice better than what it was for the 2016 election year, when he, John Mahama, was President?