2028 Will Not Be Won With Posters, Praise Singers or Propaganda — It Will Be Won By Performance
Power has a short memory in Ghanaian politics. The crowd that cheers you today can bury your ambition tomorrow without apology. That is the brutal lesson hidden inside the 2024 elections, and President John Mahama and his appointees must understand it early. The next battle for the NDC will not begin in 2028. It has already begun inside government offices, cabinet meetings, policy rooms, and implementation failures. This is the uncomfortable truth many appointees do not want to hear: if the Mahama administration fails to fulfill the promises in its Social Contract with Ghanaians, no amount of billboards, media propaganda, online influencers, or internal campaigning will save the NDC in 2028.
Ghanaians are tired. Tired of speeches without results. Tired of politicians who campaign like revolutionaries but govern like tourists. Tired of leaders who spend more energy promoting future presidential ambitions than solving present national problems. The Ghanaian voter of today is not the same voter of yesterday. The electorate has evolved. Citizens now watch politics with suspicion, anger, and survival instincts. People no longer clap simply because a politician trends online or pays communicators to manufacture popularity.
In fact, one dangerous illusion is quietly growing within political circles: the belief that personal branding can replace national performance. It cannot. No appointee in the current administration can successfully market themselves as a future leader while the ordinary Ghanaian is drowning in unemployment, hardship, poor infrastructure, and broken promises. Politics is cruel that way. When governments fail, individual ambitions collapse with them. That is why every minister, deputy minister, MMDCE, CEO, advisor, and presidential appointee should understand one strategic reality: their political future depends entirely on whether the Mahama government succeeds now. Leadership begins with responsibility, not self-promotion.
Those nursing presidential and parliamentary ambitions for 2028 should stop behaving like candidates and start behaving like nation builders. The smartest political strategy today is not secret lobbying. It is delivery. Deliver the 24-hour economy. Deliver the Big Push infrastructure agenda. Support the Attorney General in pursuing ORAL without fear or selective justice. Deliver sustainable jobs to the youth. Deliver visible improvements in the masses’ lives. Because if these policies succeed, something powerful happens automatically: the Ghanaian people themselves begin identifying future leaders from within the government based on contribution, sacrifice, competence, and discipline. Not the usual noise, which often translates into votes buying and some rigging tactics.
History shows that voters eventually separate workers from performers. One builds quietly. The other trends loudly. But when elections arrive, suffering citizens, not spectators, vote with memory, not excitement. That is why appointees paying people to write exaggerated praise articles about them may be wasting time. Ghanaians have become more politically discerning. They can now detect manufactured popularity from genuine leadership.
A NDC politician or appointee who cannot help make the current administration successful cannot convincingly ask to lead the next administration. That is the political trap ahead. Whoever eventually emerges as the NDC’s presidential candidate in 2028 will not campaign on slogans alone. They will campaign on the achievements or failures of the current Mahama administration they served under. And that changes everything. In politics, governments do not collapse only because of opposition attacks. Sometimes they collapse because insiders become more committed to succession battles than national transformation.
If the NDC keeps its promises, the party must become stronger than any individual ambition. If it fails, internal campaigns and media glorification will become useless decorations on a collapsing structure. The lessons from the 2024 elections show that the 2028 elections will not be won by the loudest political voice. They will be won by those who changed lives when they had the chance.
God bless our homeland, Ghana!
Nabla Dawuni, legally known as Abdul Rafiiu Alhassan, is a teacher, teacherpreneur, and social-change advocate operating at the electrified crossroads of politics, economics, society, technology, and human advancement.
Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here."