Ghanaians give former President Mahama an opportunity to eclipse his fragile legacy.

News Mania Desk / Piyal Chatterjee / 13th December 2024

Ghana’s electoral commission was scheduled to reveal the official results of Saturday’s presidential election on Tuesday. However, by Sunday morning, Mahamudu Bawumia, the country’s vice-president and the flag-bearer of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), and his campaign staff had seen enough to give up.

“The data from our own internal collation of the results indicates that … John Mahama has won the presidential election decisively,” he stated at a press conference, demanding his opponent to concede. The commission confirmed the outcome on Monday: former President Mahama of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) won with 56% of the vote against Bawumia’s 41%.

The NPP’s defeat, by one of the greatest margins in recent history, was interpreted as a punishment for the outgoing government’s performance. Commentators speculated that Ghanaians were sufficiently dissatisfied with the condition of affairs to re-elect Mahama, whom they had abruptly ousted in 2016 – the first time an incumbent has been unseated.The former president’s comeback on his third attempt makes him the only person in the West African country to win two non-consecutive terms.

The election continued a pattern that voters have carefully maintained since the return to multiparty democracy in 1992: every government that has lasted two four-year terms has been replaced by the opposition. Economic hardship was a big factor: at one time, inflation reached 50%, the cedi fell to historic lows, and the amount of levies grew. Economists praised a banking sector cleansing that resulted in thousands of job losses, but voters were also outraged by a bloated cabinet that included some relatives of the president and ruling party members.

Theophilus Acheampong, an economist and associate lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, says Ghana has received 17 bailouts from the International Monetary Fund since its independence in 1957.So a clear hint that the government was on its way out was its handling of talks with the IMF for a three-year, $3 billion rescue package when the country defaulted on foreign debt obligations,

“It was preceded by the government not telling the truth to Ghanaians in the sense that when the president said the government was not going to embark on any IMF journey, the finance minister came to make an announcement that they have taken the decision to go,” he said.

This lost the government a great deal of goodwill. Pensioners protested in the capital in 2023 about delayed payouts caused by a contentious debt exchange programme imposed as part of the IMF facility’s restrictions.Experts believe that all of this contributed significantly to voter indifference during the elections.

“In the past two elections, Ghana’s election turnout rates have exceeded 70%,” according to Boahen. “The most recent one, conducted in 2020, had a turnout percentage of almost 79%, but this one dropped to 60.9%. In the Ashanti area, the NPP’s stronghold, apathy was so high that turnout was approximately 35%.

Beyond that, witnesses and analysts say the NDC learned from prior setbacks and implemented a variety of measures to win the election. One of them was to mobilise its supporters to stay watchful and monitor the process in order to prevent ballot tampering.

“We have put in place superior counter-rigging strategies and are monitoring every official of the electoral commission and their collaborators,” claimed NDC spokesperson Abass Nurudeen on the eve of the vote.Over the weekend, NDC supporters across the country displayed their party’s green, white, and red colors. However, experts warn that for Mahama, who can legally serve just a four-year term, the honeymoon will be short as he seeks to rebuild the economy and erase the blotched legacy.

To succeed, said Lloyd Adu Amoah, a political science lecturer at the University of Ghana, he will have to “rein in political apparatchiks who may want to exploit the return to power for their selfish material ends”. Amoah said: “If this second shot at the presidency is also squandered, Mahama will surely have no one to blame but himself.”