Professor Joshua Alabi, Campaign Manager for John Mahama’s 2024 campaign, has highlighted several key factors behind the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) loss in the 2024 general elections, particularly in the Northern regions.
The NPP had expected a competitive split with the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the North, but the NDC emerged victorious, securing a majority of parliamentary seats and a larger share of the presidential vote.
In an interview with Bernard Avle on The Point of View, aired on Channel One TV, Professor Alabi attributed the NPP’s poor performance in the North to the party’s failure to deliver on promises made to the region. He stated that voters shifted their support to the NDC due to unmet expectations and broken promises by the NPP government.
He specifically criticized Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the NPP’s presidential candidate and leader of the government’s Economic Management Team, for failing to fulfill key pledges, such as the ‘One Village, One Dam’ initiative, which promised dams in every district, and the allocation of one million dollars per constituency—both of which remain largely unimplemented.
Professor Alabi stressed that the NDC’s success in the North was driven by the electorate’s demand for accountability and real development.
“It started in 2016, they had a good material in the name of John Dramani Mahama, but he was the President at that time. Another Northerner comes and tells them that no, you vote for me, one-child-one chocolate, you vote for me and One-District-One-Dam. And I must tell you getting a dam in any of the communities in the North is a breakthrough. So when you come and tell us that One-District-One-Dam, is a very good campaign message.
“One-Constituency-One million dollars, who doesn’t want this? So it makes some people shift. And now haven’t shifted, the man [Bawumia] had sat in the chair as a leader of the Economic Management Team, and he couldn’t even fulfil the promises that he made.
“So they had to shift to their own man who had been truthful to them and had been doing what he told them he would do. And that is what is accounting for moving from the increases in the North for the NPP to decline in the 2024 elections.”
