Author: Dr. John Osae-Kwapong, Democracy and Development Fellow, CDD-Ghana, and Project Director, the Democracy Project

The 2024 election is a settled matter. The New Patriotic Party (NPP) lost to the National Democratic Congress (NDC), ending the party’s eight years in power and returning John Mahama to the presidency.

It also ended the NPP’s attempt to do the impossible in the 4^th Republic – breaking the eight-year party turnover cycle. There has been no shortage of postmortems with partisans, political analysts, and ordinary citizens all offering their views of what went wrong.

There is, however, one dimension of the NPP’s defeat that continues to hold my attention: the intriguing, almost paradoxical way in which Ghanaians felt about the government and the party as election day approached. It was very evident that Ghanaians were unhappy.

Conversations in public spaces showed that. Data from trusted sources like the Afrobarometer survey confirmed it. Nonetheless, there is still something intriguing about Ghanaian sentiments in 2024 and that is what this piece sets out to reflect on. It is what I describe as disapproval without abandonment.

The piece uses data from the Afrobarometer survey, using three rounds to trace the trajectory of public sentiment toward the NPP government. Round 7 (2017) serves as the baseline — capturing how Ghanaians felt about the NPP government at the onset of its tenure in office.

This is contrasts Round 9 (2022), which captures the depth of disapproval midway during the its second term in office, and Round 10 (2024), which reveals the failure to recover from disapproval but not complete abandonment.

Disapproval

The extent of Ghanaian disapproval of the NPP is difficult to fully document in a single opinion piece. The illustrations that follow are therefore selective to help paint the picture of a public that had lost faith in the incumbent government.

The first illustration is the public’s assessment of the president. His performance approval rating dropped from 76% (2017) to 29% (2022) to 31% (2024). Coupled with the change in performance approval rating was the decline in trust levels. The percentage of Ghanaians saying the trusted the president “a lot” changed as follows: 47% (2017), 32% (2022) and 28% (2024).

The second illustration is the public’s assessment of government performance. Across every problem domain, there was a significant decline in approval of how the NPP government was handling each of them.

Between 2017 and 2022, performance approval dropped as follows – managing the economy (-47pts), addressing education needs (-29pts), creating jobs (-28pts), and improving basic health services (-19pts).

The third illustration is how Ghanaians, overall, felt about democracy. In 2017, eight out of ten Ghanaians (78%) expressed satisfaction with the way democracy was working in the country.

By 2022, that dropped to five out of ten Ghanaians (51%) and remained so (50%) in 2024. In summary, Ghanaians pulled away from the president and his government, and were dissatisfied with the way democracy was working in Ghana.

Disapproval without Abandonment

There is an easy and straightforward counterargument to my assertion that there was disapproval without abandonment. Afterall, what greater sign of abandonment is there than losing an election? I do not dismiss that argument.

On December 7, 2024 at the ballot box, Ghanaian voters indeed did walk away from the NPP by voting them out of power. However, I assert that abandonment is not only an electoral event but also the disposition of voters even as they vote you out of office.

The NPP rolled out several policy initiatives during their time in office. In Afrobarometer Round 10 (2024), Ghanaians were asked “Please tell me whether you agree or disagree with the following statements: Regardless of which party wins the 2024 national elections, the next government should continue to implement the following initiatives.”

They answered (percentage who agreed/strongly agreed) as follows: 86% (Free SHS); 83% (Planting/rearing for food and jobs); 74% (One District, One Factory); and 64 % (One village, one dam). And yet here is where the paradox asserts itself most forcefully.

A party whose president had lost the confidence of the public, whose governance had been rated unsatisfactory across the board, and whose tenure witnessed citizen satisfaction with democracy plumet to a historic low — as per the Afrobarometer survey— somehow retained strong support for its key signature policies among at least six out of every seven Ghanaians.

Here is an additional small footnote. When asked “which party do you feel close to,” 45% said NDC while 41% said NPP. Why the small (4percentage points) party affiliation gap judging by the extent of disapproval?

How do we reconcile all of this because surely this is not the profile of a political party fully abandoned by Ghanaian. This is precisely the question I invite you to reflect upon and whose answers must guide any narrative of what the future holds for the NPP.