Ghana Goes Green as former president Mahama stages a comeback with a bang!

Ghana’s contentious presidential and parliamentarian elections on December 7 between the two dominant parties in the 4^th Republic provided several firsts.

Former president John Dramani Mahama of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), who was the first one-term president in Ghana’s 4^th Republic, shocked both critics and observers with his almost 57% of the total valid votes, representing some 6.3 million voters, while his closest competitor, Dr. Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and current vice president of the Republic of Ghana, garnered close to 42%, representing approximately 4.7 million voters.

The other ten presidential candidates got a combined valid vote of less than 2%. 

On the parliamentarian side, the National Democratic Congress has won more of the 276 seats in parliament than anyone expected. Some seats are, however, still in contention at press time.  Independent candidates had 4 seats.

There were more than 18 million valid voters registered by the Electoral Commission of Ghana, of whom about 11.2 million exercised their franchise, representing about 61%.

President-elect John Dramani Mahama is among the few astute Ghanaian politicians who cut his political teeth from the grassroot levels and worked his way up the (political) ladder.

The 66-year-old meandered through the ranks of an assemblyman, a parliamentarian, minister of communications, vice president, president, and now president-elect. No other Ghanaian thus far has crawled through the corridors of politics to eventually climb the political ladder to its peak.

When former president Mahama announced his intention to run again for the 2024 presidential elections after losing the 2020 elections, the sitting NPP government gave him no dog’s chance. He was written off and dismissed as a spent rod.

Drawing on his vast political experience, former president John Dramani Mahama put his political savviness into motion. Together with his team of street-smart party members, they burnt the candle on both ends to reengineer, reconstruct, and rehabilitate a seemingly dying political party.

They promised never to be humiliated again, as happened in the 2016 elections, and never to be defeated, as also happened in the 2020 elections.

While the New Patriotic Party went to sleep, the pumped-up National Democratic Congress apparatchik got their feet wet, put rubber to asphalt, and hit the ground running.

In our editorial on December 1, 2024, we opined that “Crowd pulling at political campaigns and events for the two major parties has been phenomenal. But mammoth crowds at rallies as well as development projects do not always win elections. Strategies do.”

The New Patriotic Party never saw it coming, and in the late hours of December 7, 2024, the party and its presidential candidate were hit from behind with a 100-ton brick-and-mortar. They slipped into an avalanche before they realized what hit them.

Now, the humbled New Patriotic Party must take solace from a lyrical line of Robert Nesta Marley’s track titled “The Heathen,” which says, “Is he who fight and run away, live to fight another day,” just as former president John Dramani Mahama did.

Not only must the Elephant fraternity party go back to the drawing board for self-introspection, but it must also undertake a laser-precision surgery to dissect the ailments that caused the internal organs of the beast of the forest to fail and fall.

As Amandla doffs its hat for President-elect John Mahama, and Vice President-elect Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang (the first female in the country to occupy the position), we would like to reiterate the caution given by him to Ghanaians that all is not yet honey and milk, and Ghanaians must be prepared to tighten their belts for austerity measures that would hopefully ease economic hardships on the populace.

The road will be hard, rough, and muddy, but we hope and pray he will be able to weather the storm and bring the sails back to port in whole.

We are talking about the rough oceans of corruption, illegal mining (locally referred to as galamsey), nepotism, and cronyism in his government. If he wants to etch his name in the history books of Ghana, Africa, and indeed the world, President-elect Mahama must nip these forms of societal retardedness in the bud before they manifest, or he would quickly be forgotten once he’s out of the political landscape.

A simple political exercise that claims a human life may be described as successful, as others have observed, but Amandla thinks otherwise because the elections were not necessarily peaceful.

Post-election activities by a winning party are characterized by acts of hooliganism, thievery, and thuggery.

The NPP did it in the past and the NDC has revisited it. We must understand that if we adopt the system of tooth for tooth and eye for eye, Ghanaians will be living in a toothless and eyeless nation.

It is becoming one too many, and incoming President Mahama has a duty to stem it once and for all.

And on this, we give our unreserved gratitude to Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia for quickly conceding defeat when it was obvious he had lost the battle, before the Electoral Commission made the pronouncement.

He inadvertently saved Ghana from descending into a state of anarchy. We hope his exemplary statesmanship will be an open book for other potential leaders to emulate.

Indubitably, the hardest working vice president in the history of the Republic of Ghana put up a spirited campaign, but his best was obviously not good enough in the eyes of Ghanaians.

Ghana moves on.