Factors accounting for NPP’s abysmal performance in elections 

I grew up in Dansoman before I moved out of the country. My neighbours were in the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and my mother was in the New Patriotic Party (NPP). When elections came about I only knew one thing, my mother liked NPP so the NPP must be the better party. Fast forward several years now, I can now look at these parties with a much more critical lens.

Although the NPP took an overall victory in the current election, it is undeniable that huge losses have been underway, especially in the Parliament. The incumbent party had many losses. Many of its MPs are now out of jobs and will now have to find a way to make an actual honest living at least for the next four years.

In 2016, the NPP had 169 seats to NDC's 106. Fast forward to now and we have the NPP down by 33 seats and the NDC up by 33 seats. That leads me to make these few assumptions. In the past four years, the NPP and the MPs have been stagnant, slow or unwilling to react to the demands and the needs of the people they claim to serve. NDC, on the other hand, is making a meteoric rise in the political scene as they claim to be what these failing constituencies need or the youth wants. Whichever of these scenarios that may be, it is irrefutable that if change does not happen swiftly in the NPP, the lost grounds that Sammi Awuku promises will be recaptured will be nothing more than a pipe dream and these seats will end up permanently in the hands of the NDC.

It is not uncommon for an incumbent party to lose seats in the legislative body and still win the presidency. It just means that the people like their President, but do not like their MPs. The strange part of this situation is how the NDC MPs would still be able to win votes while sharing a ballot with the name Mahama right next to theirs. If a party who has chosen a man this undeniably corrupt as their flagbearer then the scenario highlighted above as NDC making a meteoric rise in the political scene is moot.

Then we are left with these two other scenarios – the youth who are now entering politics have seen the mistakes their parents have made, continuously reelecting MPs that have done absolutely nothing for their Constituencies and have instead focused solely on enriching themselves. Or the youth have seen all of the mistakes made by their parents, they have seen their MPs get richer while their towns continue to struggle and have decided this won’t be what will happen in their area. And so sitting MPs have been removed and new ones have come in.

This can be highlighted in the Wenchi constituency, where a constituency which has been historically blue since 2004 decided to flip Green in 2020. Prof. George Yaw Djan-Baffour was humiliated after losing a seat he had been occupying for almost a decade now. NDC's Seidu Haruna will now be representing them for the next four years.

The end seems near for the NPP. What should have been something that was a simple task – catering to the needs of the people being governed, ended up becoming a game of politics wherein instead of focusing on the task at hand, the party elites decided to enrich themselves. And that is why the NPP is at the point where it has lost seats. How many more seats will the NPP lose in the election if change does not come quickly?