Ghana’s ruling party will elect its candidate for the next presidential election in 2024 on Saturday, hoping to succeed outgoing leader Nana Akufo-Addo at the helm of the country since 2017.
In these primaries, New Patriotic Party (NPP) delegates will have to choose between four aspiring candidates. Mahamudu Bawumia, the country’s vice president since 2017 and former deputy governor of the central bank, appears to be the big favorite for this internal designation.
“I represent the NPP’s best chance of winning the 2024 election,” he assured during a press conference on Thursday. “I am committed to maintaining the unity of the party and bringing everyone together,” defended the candidate, who sees himself as “more popular with the population than with the elites.”
His main opponent, the current MP for Assin Central constituency, Kennedy Agyapong, also makes this argument. Its spokesman William Kusi told the AFP news agency on Thursday that he was “confident in the victory on Saturday”. “We expect 70% of the vote, we have the people with us,” he added.
For Dr. For Kwame Asah-Asante, a political science professor at the University of Ghana, the battle is close and will be fought “between Bawumia and Agyapong.” “Both have a chance of winning,” he believes.
Compared to them, former Agriculture Minister Owusu Afriyie Akoto and former MP Francis Addai-Nimoh appear as outsiders.
Economic crisis
“The polls seem to show Bawumia as the winner,” Kwasi Amakye-Boateng, a professor at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, told AFP. “But he shouldn’t be too proud of it. If he represents the party in 2024, he will have to deal with the country’s economic situation and that will not be easy,” he says.
A major cocoa and gold producer, Ghana also has gas and oil reserves, but like other sub-Saharan African countries, its debt load has exploded, particularly under the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Covid-19 and the Ukraine conflict.
The current economic crisis is the worst the country has experienced in decades. Inflation rose by 40% compared to the previous year. At the beginning of October, hundreds of opposition activists demonstrated on the streets of the capital to protest against the economic crisis and government leadership.
President Nana Akufo-Addo, elected under NPP colors in 2017 and whose two consecutive constitutionally sanctioned mandates are coming to an end, was forced to turn to the IMF last year to ward off the specter of a default, the mentioned by certain economists. So he reached an agreement with the financial institution for $3 billion.
The candidate that the NPP will elect on Saturday will face in 2024 the opponent John Dramani Mahama, 64 years old, former president from 2012 to 2017, who was selected in May, again wearing the colors of his party, the National Democratic Congress, to wear (NDC).
Political changes in Ghana have been peaceful since the country joined the multi-party system in 1992.