• GHANA

Bawumia tries to defy economic gravity

Against a backdrop of slow recovery from a devastating national debt crisis, the vice-president promises to make history

Using the slogan ‘Breaking the Eight’, Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia is vying to succeed President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in an ambitious bid to win a third consecutive national election for the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).

This will be the ninth general election since the country’s return to multi-party democracy in 1992. Three of these – 2000, 2008 and 2016 – produced alternations of power: establishing a pattern of changing the governing party every eight years. It would be unprecedented if Bawumia wins in the presidential and parliamentary elections on 7 December but by no means impossible. Reliable polling data is sparse. Both the two main parties say they are on course for a convincing win.
The assumption on the streets of most big cities is that John Dramani Mahama, standing for president for the opposition National Democratic Congress, is more likely to win. And that has been picked up by foreign diplomats and businesspeople.

It’s not that Mahama’s record on economic management and corruption is impressive. His first term as president from 2012 to 2016 bequeathed multiple economic problems to the incoming NPP administration.

Both candidates are campaigning regardless of their poor records on economic management. During the eight years of the Akufo-Addo presidency, Bawumia has been at the centre its shaky economic management, excessive borrowing and spending, ill-advised taxes, the collapse of Ghana’s currency (the cedi) against the US dollar, multiple corruption scandals and the rising cost of living and unemployment (AC Vol 63 No 5, Activists rally against E-Levy as government launches consultations & Vol 63 No 16, Monumental disputes and Vol 64 No 6, Fights over debt and public spending are shaping the election campaign).

The government owed US$63.3 billion at the end of 2022 to foreign creditors as well as domestic lenders – pension funds, insurance companies and local banks that believed government securities were a safe investment. After defaulting on billions of dollars, the NPP government was compelled to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $3bn loan, Ghana’s 17th financial rescue from the IMF since 1957 (AC Vol 63 No 14, A reluctant reversion to the IMF). And the IMF required the government to settle its domestic debt before it could receive the bailout. (AC Vol 65 No 22, Accra jumps through more debt hoops).

Aftershocks
The sovereign debt default and restructuring rippled throughout Ghanaian society. In 2022, former Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo joined a large group of pensioners to protest against the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP). Showing how widespread the problems are, in 2023, road contractors, the union representing student nurses and midwives, and independent power producers all demanded the government pay the money it owed them, with businesses warning they faced collapse.

Bawumia has struggled to address the NPP’s poor record on integrity. In 2019, the government lost $190m in aid from the United States government over plans to reform the state power company. For a country that loses an estimated $2.4bn annually to outages or ‘dumsor’, that money could have facilitated the reform of the power sector which generates 65% of power from fossil fuels, 34.1% from hydro and only 0.6% from solar.

In 2022, the Auditor-General’s revelation of $1.7bn of misappropriated Covid-19 funds , and the reclassification of Achimota forest in the capital for redevelopment sparked public outrage and fuelled the widely held view that it was merely a scheme to share parcels of land among party cronies (AC Vol 63 No 20, Penalise the plunder, say protestors).

Despite value-for-money criticisms from civil society groups, that same year the government pushed through the Agyapa gold plan, under which a state company was registered in the British tax haven of Jersey and sold 49% of its shares to investors on the London and Accra stock exchanges for $1bn (AC Vol 63 No 12, Government to ram through gold scheme).

Apparently desperate to generate cashflow in 2023, the government demanded $773m in back taxes from mobile operator MTN, only to later drop the demand. And earlier this year, Italian oil and gas major ENI relocated some of its operations to neighbouring countries due to the government’s heavy-handedness over oil deals.

Even though Bawumia has tried to distance himself from the Akufo-Addo government’s record on the economy, Mahama and the opposition have always been quick to remind voters that he served as chair of the government’s economic management team and cannot escape blame (AC Vol 65 No 23, Debt and inflation drag Bawumia down).

Bawumia is hoping voters will look favourably on the government’s free Senior High School (SHS) programme; a favoured project of Akufo-Addo’s which has increased enrolment significantly. Yet the Center for Democratic Development, an NGO based in Accra, says shifting resources and priorities away from primary to secondary schools has weakened the foundations of the public education system. While primary schools received 30% of the education budget between 2007 and 2010, this dropped to 18% between 2017 and 2020. The allocation for secondary education, however, went from 15% of the budget to 35% over the same period.

‘Nosedive’
Substantial under-investment in infrastructure and poor teacher accountability persist as some of the unaddressed challenges in the education sector, and Bawumia recently promised to improve schools’ infrastructure. Some 87% of Ghanaians agreed in 2019 that the free SHS policy had created an opportunity for many students to enrol in school, but their rating of the government’s performance on education has since taken a ‘nosedive’, according to Afrobarometer.

As a technocrat with innovative ideas on leveraging technology to fix some public sector problems, Bawumia appeals to a cross-section of middle-class voters. But his association with and role in the Akufo-Addo government, presiding over arguably the country’s worst financial crisis since independence, hinders his ability to broaden his electoral support.

Even if he manages to win, Bawumia may not have effective control of his government in 2025, particularly on key cabinet and public sector appointments. His campaign is largely financed by a consortium of loyalists to the current Akufo-Addo administration. They comprise: Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko (owner of Asaase Radio); Freddie Blay (former NPP Chairman and current Board Chair of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation-GNPC), Ken Ofori Atta (former Finance Minister) and Kennedy Agyapong (businessman and populist Member of Parliament for Assin Central in the Central Region).

If Ghanaians are unhappy with the NPP’s performance, they are not much enthused about former President Mahama. His major policy proposal is to create a 24-hour economy, which academics and civil society groups have criticised as overly ambitious and premature. Critics say his plans fail to address power cuts and disproportionately rely on road transportation. Other modes of inland transportation (railway, water) have remained undeveloped (water) or left to decay (railways) over the decades. Road transportation accounts for 95% of passenger transportation and 98% of freight transport. Analysts at CDD-Ghana point to the fragmentation of in-sector governance, with four ministries handling various transportation sub-sectors (aviation, roads, railways, ports), which compounds problems of policy coordination and implementation.

Unlike Bawumia, John Mahama is able to self-finance his presidential campaign along with his brother, Ibrahim Mahama, Chief Executive of Engineers & Planners. The company benefited from government contracts and deals in the minerals mining and oil and gas sectors under Mahama’s presidency between 2012 and 2016.

The lack of excitement around either candidate may mean a low turnout. According to Ghanaian law, a presidential candidate must achieve 50% plus 1 of the total votes cast to win the election.  Identity politics is key to Ghana’s elections. The two major parties (NPP and NDC) are almost guaranteed 45% of the vote each in every election because of the country’s ethnic-religious divide. The remaining 10%, often comprising middle-class floating voters, decide the outcome. Recent Afrobarometer data shows that only 15% of Ghanaians plan to split their votes between the parties in the presidential and parliamentary elections, and just 6% indicate they prefer independent candidates.

 Opposition activists have raised concerns that the NPP may abuse its incumbency by sending the military to intimidate voters in NDC strongholds, including parts of the Volta region. We hear the NPP has enlisted French-based political consultancy Concerto in its effort to retain power. The NPP has intensified campaigning in Ashanti region trying to mobilise the voters in what the party sees as its home territory.

Now or never
For both candidates, it may be now or never. If Bawumia loses, he is less likely to be given the nod as flag bearer of a predominantly Akan party in 2028. For Mahama, campaign funds could dry up, making another presidential bid in 2028 a herculean task. The campaigns of both parties have been characterised by disinformation and acrimony. Their favoured analysts are predicting clashes in Ashanti and Northern regions during and after the elections. Last month, the US State Department warned that it would restrict visas for people who undermine Ghana’s democracy ahead of the election.

The role of the Electoral Commission and the Supreme Court will be crucial in resolving any post-election disputes. Yet trust in both institutions has waned.

A recent Afrobarometer survey shows only 36% of Ghanaians trust the Electoral Commission ‘a lot or somewhat’. The opposition has accused the Supreme Court of bias in rulings in high-profile political cases. The NDC, which lost the 2021 presidential election, had petitioned the court to declare the election results invalid, but the case was dismissed.

On 12 November, the Supreme Court restored the ruling party’s majority in parliament when it overturned the Speaker’s declaration of four seats as vacant, calling the move unconstitutional. Lawyers and legal academics have criticised the Supreme Court for hurriedly assuming jurisdiction in the parliamentary case which the Constitution designates the High Court as the appropriate forum. Last month, two members of parliament from the NPP and one from the NDC announced that they would stand as independent candidates in the election, while an independent candidate joined the NPP.

Speaker Alban Bagbin declared their seats vacant, arguing that the constitution does not allow MPs to cross the floor. Parliament was adjourned indefinitely after this. Bagbin’s decision had shifted the parliamentary majority to the NDC, giving it one seat more than the NPP’s 135. The parliamentary stand-off is intensifying ahead of the elections and tells its own story about the spiralling partisanship in public life and the loss of faith in public institutions.

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