Ghana’s political history has been dominated by two parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Despite the emergence of smaller parties and independent candidates, the political reality remains that these two parties are likely to remain the principal contenders for the presidency for the foreseeable future.
That, however, should not make either party complacent.
The experience of Nigeria’s once powerful People’s Democratic Party (PDP) offers Ghana an instructive warning. Founded on 31 August 1998, in the transition out of military rule, the PDP went on to govern Nigeria for sixteen consecutive years, winning four successive presidential elections under Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999 and 2003, Umaru Yar’Adua in 2007, and Goodluck Jonathan in 2011. At its height, it controlled the presidency, commanded the National Assembly, and governed the overwhelming majority of Nigeria’s states. Then, in 2015, it lost the presidency to Muhammadu Buhari and the newly formed All Progressives Congress, the first time in Nigeria’s history that an incumbent president was defeated at the polls. A political party can dominate for decades, control every major lever of the state, and still gradually lose its political machinery when it becomes disconnected from voters, divided internally and overly confident about its electoral strength.
Ghana’s NDC and NPP should study that experience carefully.
The NPP should study the 2024 election without excuses
The 2024 election was not merely an election the NPP lost. It was a political message.
John Mahama and the NDC won the presidential election with just over fifty-six per cent of the vote, polling roughly 6.3 million votes to Mahamudu Bawumia’s 4.5 million, a margin of well over a million and a half votes, on a turnout of nearly sixty-four per cent. The NDC also secured a commanding parliamentary majority, taking 183 of Parliament’s 276 seats to the NPP’s 88, with the remainder split among independents, a swing of roughly ninety-five seats from the 2020 result.
The NPP should therefore resist the temptation to reduce the defeat to a single candidate, a single campaign mistake or temporary economic difficulties.
The deeper question should be:
What did the Ghanaian voter actually tell the NPP in 2024?
The answer requires more than studying voting figures. It requires listening to the frustrations, expectations and changing attitudes of the electorate.
A party that treats an electoral defeat merely as a temporary setback can easily prepare to fight the next election with the same assumptions that caused it to lose the previous one.
The NPP has already taken an important step by electing Dr Mahamudu Bawumia as its flagbearer for 2028, winning the party’s presidential primary held on 31 January 2026 with a decisive 56.48 per cent of over 211,000 votes cast, well clear of his closest rival, Kennedy Agyapong, who took roughly 24 per cent. Yet even that result carries a quiet warning of its own. Roughly forty-four per cent of the party’s own delegates did not vote for him, a figure the NDC’s own election officials were quick to highlight publicly as evidence of unresolved internal division within the NPP itself.
The real test now is whether the party will use the period before 2028 to rebuild the organisation, repair public confidence and rethink its relationship with the Ghanaian electorate.
Choosing a candidate is only one part of rebuilding a political party.
The NDC should be careful about the danger of victory
The NDC has an equally important lesson to learn, although it comes from a different position.
The NDC won a decisive victory in 2024. It captured the presidency and secured a substantial parliamentary majority.
But electoral victory can be more dangerous to a political party than electoral defeat if victory produces complacency.
The NDC should remember what happened to the PDP.
The PDP did not collapse because it suddenly became a small party. It declined gradually. It became too comfortable with its political machinery. Internal interests became increasingly important. Powerful individuals and factions competed for influence, culminating in a 2013 breakaway faction, the so-called new PDP, that weakened the party from within even before its opposition had fully organised itself. Eventually, politicians who once depended on the party began looking for alternative political vehicles, many of them finding a home in the newly merged APC.
That is the danger the NDC must avoid.
The question for the NDC should therefore not be:
“How do we win 2028?”
It should first be:
“What must we do between now and 2028 so that Ghanaians will still want us to govern?”
Those are two very different questions.
The NDC’s succession process deserves particular attention
This is perhaps the most important issue facing the NDC now.
President John Mahama has returned to the presidency and, under Ghana’s constitutional term limits, cannot seek another term after 2028.
The NDC must therefore eventually choose the person who will carry the party beyond Mahama.
That process has already generated considerable discussion around possible successors, including figures such as Johnson Asiedu Nketia, Julius Debrah, Haruna Iddrisu and Cassiel Ato Forson. Polling and political commentary currently show a fluid contest rather than an established successor.
This is precisely where the NDC should learn from the history of other dominant parties.
The succession process must not become a struggle for survival among factions.
If aspiring candidates begin building competing camps, financing separate political structures and mobilising supporters against one another, the party could create the very divisions that eventually weaken it, exactly as competing power centres within the PDP hastened its own decline a decade ago.
A leadership contest is healthy.
A factional war disguised as a leadership contest is dangerous.
The NDC needs a transparent, credible and disciplined succession process in which those who lose the contest remain committed to the party and work for the eventual candidate.
That is how political institutions survive individual leaders.
And Ghana should not be too confident about the absence of a third force
Some people argue that Ghana is different from Nigeria.
They are right.
Ghana’s electoral system, political history and two-party competition make it considerably more difficult for a third party to suddenly displace the NDC or NPP.
But “difficult” does not mean “impossible.”
The rise of a third force does not necessarily require a new party to immediately win the presidency. A third force can first attract young voters, influence policy, take parliamentary seats, weaken one of the major parties, attract prominent politicians, create regional political bases, and eventually become a serious national competitor.
The NPP’s 2024 defeat itself should remind the party that electoral assumptions can change quickly.
The NDC should remember the same thing.
Ghanaian voters are not permanent property of either party
This may be the most important lesson.
The NDC does not own the voters who voted for it in 2024.
The NPP did not own the voters who supported it in previous elections.
Voters are not party assets. They can change their minds. They can punish a government. They can abandon a party. They can vote for a candidate from another party. They can stay home. And increasingly, voters can distinguish between the party, the candidate and the performance of the government.
The 2024 election demonstrated just how dramatically electoral preferences can shift. In a single electoral cycle, the NPP moved from holding the presidency and a comfortable parliamentary majority of 137 seats to a majority electoral defeat and just 88 seats, while the NDC moved from opposition into government with a 183-seat parliamentary supermajority.
That should make both parties humble.
The real danger is internal complacency
There is a pattern that political parties should fear.
Victory leads to confidence, confidence to complacency, complacency to entitlement, entitlement to internal competition, internal competition to disconnection from voters, and disconnection from voters, eventually, to electoral punishment.
The reverse can happen to an opposition party. Defeat leads to blame, blame to factionalism, factionalism to defections, defections to loss of organisational strength, and loss of organisational strength to further defeat.
This is essentially the lesson that can be drawn from the PDP’s decline, a decline driven, by the party’s own historians’ accounts, not by any single scandal but by a combination of internal fragmentation, a unifying opposition, corruption allegations, an unresolved security crisis in the northeast, and an economy that had stopped delivering for ordinary Nigerians.
The NDC and NPP should therefore make a pact with themselves
They do not need to agree politically.
They should disagree vigorously. They should compete for power. They should expose each other’s failures. That is the essence of democracy.
But both should agree on something more fundamental:
No political party is bigger than the Ghanaian voter.
The NPP must accept that its 2024 defeat was a warning.
The NDC must accept that its 2024 victory is also a warning.
One says:
“Change or lose.”
The other says:
“Perform or lose.”
That is the nature of democratic politics.
The PDP should be a warning, not merely a Nigerian story
There is a tendency in Ghana to look at political developments elsewhere and say:
“That is Nigeria. Ghana is different.”
Of course Ghana is different.
But human organisations behave in remarkably similar ways. A political party can become so accustomed to power that it begins to confuse electoral success with permanent entitlement. It can become so internally competitive that the struggle for positions becomes more important than the purpose for which the party exists. It can become so dependent on personalities that the institution becomes weaker than the individuals within it. And when voters finally withdraw their support, the party discovers that the political structure it thought was permanent was only temporary. Nigeria’s PDP discovered this only after sixteen years in power. It took just one election, and one united opposition, to end it.
That is the PDP lesson.
The NDC should begin succession planning now
The NDC should not wait until the election approaches before deciding who will succeed John Mahama.
The party should establish a clear succession framework. Candidates should be allowed to compete. The process should be transparent. Delegates should have genuine choices. The party should discourage personal attacks. Candidates should be required to commit publicly to supporting whoever emerges. And, most importantly, the defeated candidates should not be permitted to turn their supporters into permanent factions within the party.
Recent reports of tension and early positioning around the NDC’s 2028 succession make this particularly relevant.
A party that manages succession well can survive its founder, its strongest leader and even its most popular president.
A party that manages succession badly can begin destroying itself while still in government.
The NPP has its own rebuilding to do
The NPP should equally resist the temptation to believe that selecting Bawumia automatically solves its 2028 problem.
It does not, and the primary result itself is a useful reminder. A candidate who cannot convince nearly half his own party’s delegates has real work to do before he can hope to convince a national electorate that rejected the party decisively less than eighteen months earlier.
The party needs to ask difficult questions about why the Ghanaian electorate rejected it so decisively in 2024. It needs to rebuild trust. It needs to reconnect with constituencies that felt neglected. It needs to examine its communication. It needs to examine its relationship with young voters. It needs to examine the conduct and performance of its government. And it needs to create enough internal space for people to criticise the party without being treated as enemies.
Opposition is not merely a period for waiting for the incumbent to fail.
Opposition should be a period of reconstruction.
Ghana’s two-party system should never become a two-party complacency system
I believe the NDC and NPP will remain Ghana’s two principal political forces for some time.
But that should not give either party a licence to behave as though voters have nowhere else to go.
The greatest protection against a third force is not suppressing smaller parties. It is good governance, internal democracy, credible leadership and responsiveness to citizens.
If the NDC governs well, maintains internal discipline and manages its succession responsibly, it will make it difficult for another party to displace it.
If the NPP learns from its defeat, rebuilds honestly and presents a credible alternative, it can return to government.
That is how democracy should work.
The lesson for 2028
The NPP should look at the PDP and say:
“This is what can happen to a party that loses its connection with the people and fails to manage its internal politics.”
The NDC should look at the PDP and say:
“This is what can happen to us if we mistake an electoral victory for a permanent mandate.”
And both parties should look at the Ghanaian voter and say:
“We do not own your vote. We have to earn it again.”
That, perhaps, is the most important lesson Ghana can take from the political collapse of the once formidable PDP, a party that governed unbroken for sixteen years and still, in the end, needed only one election to lose it all.
The 2028 election will not simply be a contest between NDC and NPP. It will be another examination of whether Ghana’s two dominant political parties have learnt that political power is borrowed from the people, never permanently owned by a party.