Why Ghanaians should elect Dr. Bawumia the next president of Ghana

For starters, Mr. John Dramani Mahama (JDM) was an incumbent president of Ghana in 2016, when Ghanaians massively voted him out of office in favor of his then main challenger Nana Akufo-Addo. Now, some of the most critical questions that need immediate attention here are: 1). Why did overwhelming number of Ghanaians voted to end the reelection bid of the then President Mahama and his NDC administration? 2). After the 2016 reelection defeat, Mr. Mahama had again lost in 2020 election to his main political nemesis Nana Akufo-Addo; so, one would want to know what has specifically changed on the grounds in this 2024 presidential contest slated for December 7?

Most likely, from the perspectives of ex-President Mahama and his ardent NDC cheerleaders, the response to the last question above would be that Nana Akufo-Addo is not on the electoral ballot owing to constitutional term-limit constraints. The implicit conclusion one can draw, therefore, from the preceding development is that the absence of Nana Addo on the 2024 presidential ticket greatly removes almost all the electoral barriers to Mr. Mahama’s success. More importantly, they (JDM and his acolytes) may point out that President Nana Akufo-Addo and his Vice President Dr. Buwumia have irreparably messed up Ghana’s economy. This presupposes that for JDM-led NDC, the only viable recourse that can help restore sanity into the country’s economic systems is to vote out NPP administration.

In fact, whether or not the foregoing claims by former President Mahama and his NDC shadows align with reality is another important question this current piece will like to explore, briefly. Indeed, a closer scrutiny of the utterances of ex-President Mahama and his 2024 campaign team reveal nothing extraordinarily new. Rather, it is a recycled political mantra primarily based on “l-told-you-so” cliché that Nana Akufo-Addo and his VP Buwumia were in there from 2016, and also in 2020, and now going for 2024. To JDM’s belief system, Nana Addo and Bawumia have never been up to anything good for Ghana, and still disturbing our peace with “breaking the eight.”

As any clear-thinking person or voter knows, constantly campaigning on political slogans, and merely reassuring the electorate that you’re different from your opponent(s) without providing credible and/or concrete rationale for that chasm. Simply put, Mr. Mahama does not have verifiable policy alternatives that can help to harvest presidency for him. Clearly, since Nana Addo-led NPP wrestled the presidency from the then President Mahama in 2016, the latter’s political campaign all along has been that Ghanaians must know by now that Nana Addo and Dr. Bawumia NPP administration is the worst ever to lead Ghana.

But the irony here is that with these new and all the so-called solution-based ideas that former President Mahama claims to have acquired over the last seven years or so, he could not step forward on the big stage and debate his major opponent Dr. Bawumia if he is confident and sure of those policies. It is obvious that mounting onto the debate platform to the full glare of Ghanaian public, and stand toe-to-toe with Dr. Bawumia comes with serious political risk. This is because Mr. Mahama knows in his subconscious that many of the policy positions he has proposed will be extremely difficult to defend and fund them without foreign loans that he has been disdainfully talked about lately.

Unfortunately, considerable number of Ghanaians is aware that Ghana, like many Sub-Saharan economies, depends on external aids/loans to bolster any shortfall in its budget or annual expenditure. The point is JDM has been going around the country telling millions of Ghanaians, and in many cases exploiting their socioeconomic gullibility and/or vulnerabilities, while arguing that Ghana has accessed more foreign loans under the ruling NPP government under Nana Addo/Dr. Bawumia than any other government since independence. Now, the question again is: Where will Mr. Mahama get all the needed funds (absence of foreign loans) to shore up the grandiose programs in his party’s Manifesto upon which he is asking Ghanaians to give him another chance to lead the country once more?

Finally, it looks as if former President Mahama is far behind high-tech communication times in that he is campaigning like someone who has no clue about the evolution of the various stages of human communication and technology, starting from oral, written, printing press, electronic, and presently, the digital age. Based on his interactions with Ghanaians so far, it is clear Dr. Bawumia understands that digitalization (digital age) via information superhighway or the Internet has demonstrated to be dominant teaching instruments while on the contrary, TV’s impact in today’s world has been insignificantly minimal.

Either out of ignorance or sheer cynicism, former President Mahama keeps mocking Dr. Bawumia for extolling the significance of “digitalization” in any country’s overall development. What Mr. Mahama and his out-of-touch campaign crew have woefully failed to learn is that TV technology primarily conveys information, but it has marginal effect on human cognition as opposed to Internet/social media (digitalized tools). In our contemporary world, the way forward in every country is digitalization, and the presidential candidate in Ghana who has proven to have profound grasps of the 21^st century high-tech is Dr. Bawumia, period!!

By—Bernard Asubonteng (aka: Africa Professor-1) USA.