By Kumi OWUSU-ANSAH
Was he truly convinced that he had it in him to pull off what everyone else regarded as mission impossible? Or did he have to tell himself this because he knew he’d probably only get one crack at the presidency?
As it turns out, the former President, John Dramani Mahama, has taken his party from a humiliating defeat in 2016 to a landslide victory in 2024, and pulled off a remarkable feat in a bit under eight years, to become the 6th president of the 4th republic.
All the advance tremors did not soften the impact of the earthquake as the NDC gains piled up over the small hours of Sunday morning on the 8th of December. Were you still glued to your Tele to watch the vice president, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, and his crew concede defeat?
How close did you come to rupturing a vital organ when you cheered to see Ursula Owusu and the gargoyle K.T. Hammond dispatched? Eight years of NPP dominance demolished and just 81 MPs, the lowest tally in their party’s recent history, left to squabble with one another in smouldering rubble.
Mr Mahama is back in the governing business with a stonking majority in the parliament to aid his second term at the presidency.
From the off, this election has been NDC’s to lose – and boy did it knew it. Every indicator signposts victory, but Mr Mahama and the NDC fought it as if there was a real risk of defeat.
“Resetting Ghana”, the simple phrase of the Mahama campaign slogan inscribed in texts and emblazoned on every podium and never absent from a Mahama speech, was a clinically utilitarian compression of the core theme.
The messaging was rigidly repetitive. Rinse and repeat: every member of the Mahama campaign team, every parliamentary candidate, members of the grassroots, until your mouth is cracked dry and you’ve given your audience tinnitus. Stick to the script. Never drop a ball. Ignore the opinion polls. Take nothing for granted. Leave nothing to chance. Get over the line.
Don’t think I’m being a critic. I say all this as a complement to the professionalism of the Mahama campaign, not least because I’ve witnessed so many past contests in which the NDC lacked the ferocious focus and the steely will to prevail in the brutal contact sport of electoral politics.
This makes it a highly personal triumph for the will to win of a leader who has often been written off. Many reckon Mr Mahama’s victory to be more outstanding achievement because the NDC has conquered an electoral Everest from such a depressed starting base.
This was a revenge election in which voters expressed their visceral loathing for the NPP much more evident than they did any love for the NDC. There are many fascinating subplots to this election, but this is the big picture story to focus on today.
Welcome to Mahama’s world. He will bestride a transformed political landscape for the foreseeable future. This victory magnifies his authority over NDC and his government will not have much to fear from opposition parties anytime soon.
The once all-conquering NPP are cut down to a twitching stump. They are already descending into a postmortem about what has befallen them and the viciousness of their recriminations will be sharpened by seeing their votes harvested by the NDC and other independent candidates.
Despite the formidable advantages NDC enjoyed going into the campaign, there were plenty of nerves jangling at camp Mahama. Understandably so, given his party’s dire record of blowing previous elections. It may have been self-evident to everyone that an NDC victory was guaranteed. It was not so to the high command of a party that has lost two previous elections.
As we puff past the halfway mark of campaigning, the NDC machinery were not in this to entertain journalists, reporters and hordes of prophets who had publicly come out to reject the possibility of Mahama 2.0 with their pronouncement of a Bawumia victory.
Mr. Mahama may be a compassionate politician, but there are limits. His core business was winning back the presidency he’d lost to the NPP as the incumbent in 2016. They were not in this to entertain anyone by being interesting.
Still less is it their job to start making gaffes that might lend a hand to wretched the NPP. It is at the point when many journalists were yawning that the average voter is beginning to engage. Journalists inwardly (and sometimes outwardly) began to get bored when they heard, for the zillionth time, Mr Mahama and the NDC deliver their stock line: “It is time for change…our country needs a reset.”
The media craved for drama and novelty, but the NDC’s contrary belief was that most voters wanted their country rescued from the direction the Akufo-Addo administration has taken it thus far.
At the smoothly choreographed event of a carefully calibrated manifesto launch, journalists itched to ask: “What’s new?” Mr Mahama pre-empted them by declaring that they’d find nothing that wasn’t already familiar in the 200-page handbook.
“There may be people today who say: where is the surprise? Where is the rabbit out of the hat?” But the bigger surprise was how the NPP run their 2024 election campaign. If you want politics as pantomime, at least, we saw how NAPO was prancing about like a wounded stoat, magnifying the performance of the current NPP government against the legacy of Dr Kwame Nkrumah.
But it’s not only the numerous smears and gaffes that dropped down from the various podiums that ruffled the feathers of many across the nation, what drove the surge of anger towards the Akufo-Addo administration is first, the failure of their economic model to create jobs and deliver rising incomes and wellbeing to ordinary Ghanaians; second, the determination of a pro-NPP caste of economists, political advisers and journalists to ignore this fact; third, the obsessional desire by super-liberal political minority to police the language of everybody else, to the detriment of devoting any significant energy to addressing the socio-economic catastrophe being lived by everyone else.
The NPP has become a party for those preferring one that frantically sprays out unfunded, slapdash, last-minute wheezes. As a strategy, that didn’t work out all that well for Dr Bawumia. They underestimated the depth of public anger against the administration.
There were fumbles and stumbles in his campaign that proved costly to their cause. Days were lost and tempest ignited during the shenanigans of Alan Kyerematen’s departure from the party, an issue that could have and should have been resolved long before their 2024 primaries. As a result, the NPP became a divided rubble going into the election.
This made Mr Mahama looked increasingly comfortable wearing the skin of president-in-waiting when Dr Bawumia failed to answer questions on the economy. The years and hours he’d put in performance training have had an effect.
At last, he had the attention of the whole nation once again. It had not transformed him into a reincarnation of JFK, but he was much more fluent and assured than he was during previous elections. He became skilled at subtly slipping a dagger between his rival’s ribs.
Switching to “digitization” from the economic wizard that Dr Bawumia had once been touted was a sign that he’d not lived up to the task.
In the last eight years the economy has performed worst under his watch; government debt has ballooned; inflation has hit a record high; the cedi has further depreciated to its weakest against the dollar than they found it in 2016; taxes as a proportion of GDP have hit highest levels; cost of living has become unbearable.
These negative indicators hurriedly sank his approval rating after eight years in government. During the election, Dr Bawumia often distanced himself from the failures of the economic team that he’d personally championed during the Akuffo-Addo administration.
Despite themselves, there was a new note of deference in the voices of prophets and journalists representing the NPP who said Mr Mahama stood no chance of a political comeback. It is clear that the polling industry in Ghana, together with the prophetic ministry have perpetrated the howler of all time in this election.
This is a dazzling achievement of Mr Mahama, the more so for being a vindication of all that the NPP accused him of during his first term as president, as we watched him swept to power once again in a grand fashion never seen since 1992. Those who want to cavil will say that the main propellant of Mr Mahama’s success is not desire to see him back in power, but loathing for the NPP.
This is not a killer point as some imagine it to be. The unpopularity of his opponent played a large part in bringing him back to the Jubilee House.
There are two worms of unease wriggling in NDC’s guts. One is that the magnitude of their mega-majority in the parliament could excite unrealisable expectations about how quickly the public will see a meaningful change.
A delay in seeing this “change” will alarm voters that they may pinch their noses and rally towards the NPP. The answer to this was to stamp down expectations of how rapidly improvement can be delivered. Mr Mahama did that during his victory speech. His sober tone struck a contrast with the bombastic vaudeville of the NPP years while reflecting the mood of a country he knows to be deeply disenchanted with its politics.
The other concern for the NDC is that there would be an enthusiasm deficit that will mean victory is tainted by a depressed turnout at the next election if they fail to deliver. So while the victory looks commanding, the mandate feels brittle.
Mr Mahama’s incoming government will sit atop a skyscraper majority, but its foundations are built on clay. Mr Mahama will have to set about earning this majority by using it to deliver. Some newly-elected NDC MPs think the time has come where there needs to be more effort to lift the spirit of the electorate.
What more can Mahama 2.0 add? Food for the soul. Yes, he has astonished all those in the country and beyond it who were once so sceptical that he was the man to take the NDC back into power.
Now he must confound those doubters already noisily questioning the towering challenges that will become the NDC’s responsibility in one month’s time. Proving, of course, to the country that his landslide victory was really worth it.
