Ransford Edward Van Gyampo, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Ghana, has taken on the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for suggesting that it lost the December 2024 election as a result of apathy.
He says members of the party need to question themselves why people failed to go out and vote on the election day and “stop tickling themselves and laughing.”
According to the Professor, the NPP’s quest to apportion their failure to merely apathy suggests a deliberate attempt to overlook the incompetence and bad governance they subjected Ghanaians to in the past 8 years.
Speaking on the KeyPoints on TV3 Saturday, December 28, 2024, the political science lecturer described as “propaganda”, the idea of singling out apathy as the cause of the monumental defeat of the NPP.
He says there were reasons that contributed to people not going out to vote which the party should look into, rather than just saying apathy caused their defeat.
“The idea that John Mahama won the 2024 elections because people didn’t go out to vote, in my view, is a nonsensical childish propagandist attempt at covering up for incompetence and bad governance.
“If you say that people did not go out to vote, without interrogating why they did not go out to vote, then it means that you’re just being propagandist and you’re trying to mask your bad governance and incompetence,” he stated.
Prof. Gyampo’s comments follow the NPP’s announcement that it is going to set up a committee to investigate the factors that led to the party’s defeat in the just ended elections, handing the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) a two-thirds majority in parliament and a huge gap in the presidential race.
National Chairman of the party, Stephen Ayesu Ntim, revealed this in a press briefing on Monday, December 23, 2024.
He said the proposed Election Review Committee will engage party stakeholders and the general public to fish out the factors that contributed to the defeat. This, Mr. Ntim noted, will inform the party’s reforms to strengthen it for the future.
“The party will in January 2025 set up an effective and objective Election Review Committee to undertake a postmortem into the outcome of the election. The committee will engage all party stakeholders and the general public on the factors and circumstances leading to our defeat,” he stated.
The party Chairman added that one critical area the committee will examine would be whether to have a constitutional amendment to restructure the party’s internal decision-making, including the mode of electing presidential and parliamentary candidates, as well as party executives.
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