Opoku Prempeh reflects on NPP’s defeat: We assumed too much, didn’t listen
NPP’s 2024 running mate, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, says months of reflection after the party’s electoral defeat have led him to one unavoidable conclusion: the Akufo-Addo administration failed to listen to the concerns of Ghanaians and paid a heavy price for it.
Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express on Tuesday, the former Education and Energy Minister admitted that a major breakdown in trust between the government and citizens significantly contributed to the NPP’s loss.
“One thing I’ve concluded in the last 10 months is that there was a broken trust between citizens to government. The trust that was broken hurt so much so that we saw the results so broken. We didn’t listen enough. We assumed a lot of things we shouldn’t have assumed.”
He noted that the government’s sense of direction was strained by an extraordinary global environment marked by economic turmoil and public health shocks.
“We had gone through the West, global economic climate, medically and economically or health-wise,” he said, adding that many governments around the world collapsed under the pressure, with only autocratic regimes remaining stable.
Dr. Prempeh pointed to dramatic shifts in global supply chains as an example of the hardship Ghanaians faced.
“A container from China that cost $1,200 had risen to $14,000. People’s lifetime savings have been wiped out,” he said.
Despite these global shocks, he insisted the administration’s biggest mistake was internal which was failing to hear the public early and clearly enough. In his view, that failure set the stage for the political fallout that followed.
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