The outcome of the New Patriotic Party’s national executive elections, held at the Baba Yara Sports Stadium in Kumasi on Saturday, 3 October 2026, provides an opportunity to ask a question that is more important than who won the various positions: has the NPP really understood why it lost the 2024 general election?
I am not convinced that it has.
My concern is not about the individuals who have been elected. More than seven thousand delegates voted, forty-seven members offered themselves for nine national offices, and the delegates exercised their right to choose the people they believe should lead their party. That democratic choice must be respected. My concern is the thinking behind the choices and what those choices tell us about the direction of the party.
What the delegates decided
The results are worth setting down plainly. John Boadu, a former General Secretary, returned to the party’s top job as National Chairman, polling 2,888 votes to former Energy Minister Boakye Agyarko’s 2,408 and former National Chairman Paul Afoko’s 790. His victory was helped by a late alliance in which another contender, Sammy Crabbe, withdrew from the race and threw his support behind him. Justin Kodua Frimpong retained the General Secretary position with 4,486 votes, the highest tally of the conference. Kojo Fosu Bamba, Henry Nana Boakye and Nana Akomea were elected vice chairmen, Nii Kwartei Titus-Glover became National Organiser, Hawa Koomson Women’s Organiser, Abanga Fuseini Yakubu Youth Organiser, and Alfred Thompson Treasurer.
In his address to the conference, the party’s flagbearer, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, said the NPP had come to Kumasi as a party that has listened and learnt. The new chairman, for his part, promised a renewed party that listens and consults more.
Those are the right words. The question is whether the party’s choices match them.
- Until the NPP accepts that it lost, it will struggle to recover
The first problem is the party’s apparent difficulty in confronting the reality of the 2024 election.
The NPP sometimes speaks about that election as though the NDC simply won it. There is an important distinction here. The NDC did not merely win. The NPP lost, and it lost by a margin that cannot be explained away. John Mahama took just over fifty-six per cent of the presidential vote, roughly 6.3 million votes to Dr Bawumia’s 4.5 million, and the NDC captured 183 of Parliament’s 276 seats to the NPP’s 88. That is not the outcome of a campaign that was merely outplayed. It is the verdict of a country.
That distinction matters because a party that believes it was simply defeated by an opponent will prepare differently from a party that accepts that voters themselves rejected its performance.
The NPP went into the 2024 election carrying the burden of public dissatisfaction with the economy and the government’s record and, in the eyes of many Ghanaians, an arrogance of power. There was a growing perception that the party had become disconnected from the ordinary citizen and was more interested in defending itself than listening to the concerns of the people.
If the party’s internal diagnosis is still largely about how the NDC campaigned, who said what, or how the NPP could have fought harder, then it has missed the point. Political parties do not lose power merely because their opponents campaign well. Sometimes they lose because citizens have had enough.
Until the NPP honestly answers the question, “Why did Ghanaians reject us?”, every discussion about rebuilding the party remains incomplete. It should be able to say, in public and in plain language, what it concluded.
- Unity does not win elections. Strategy does
I find the argument about unity particularly interesting.
The NPP appears to have placed considerable emphasis on unity, and Dr Bawumia’s call to defeated aspirants that there is work for everybody in the 2028 campaign was a gracious one. Unity sounds admirable. But political history tells us that unity by itself does not win elections. Strategy does.
The NPP should know this better than most. In 2016, the party won power at a time when it could hardly be described as the most united political organisation. The removal of Paul Afoko as national chairman and the conflicts surrounding the party’s leadership demonstrated the extent of the divisions within the organisation. Yet the party won. It is a small irony of history that Mr Afoko himself was on the ballot in Kumasi this month, and that delegates gave him 790 votes.
That experience should teach the NPP something important. Internal disagreement does not automatically make a party unelectable, just as the appearance of unity does not automatically make a party electable.
There is also a difference between real unity and perceived unity. You can put people on the same platform, take photographs together and describe the party as united. That does not necessarily mean that the underlying disagreements have disappeared.
Consider the decision to elect a flagbearer before the national executives, on the argument that doing so would promote unity. Dr Bawumia won that January primary with 56.48 per cent of the vote, a decisive result by any standard. But it also meant that roughly 44 per cent of delegates chose someone else, and that the runner-up, Kennedy Agyapong, took about 24 per cent. If early selection of the flagbearer was supposed to demonstrate unity, one must ask what became of those other contenders and their supporters, and whether the exercise genuinely produced unity. Even the Kumasi event raised questions in my mind. Where was Kennedy Agyapong?
If the NPP selected its national leaders primarily because they were perceived to represent unity around the eventual presidential candidate, I am afraid the party may have confused electoral symbolism with organisational reconstruction. A party cannot manufacture unity by declaring that it exists.
- The danger of choosing yes-men
The delegates had every right to vote for whoever they preferred. That is democracy.
But listening to the conversation surrounding the election, I became concerned about another issue: the apparent importance attached to electing people who could work comfortably with the flag bearer. That concern is not lessened by the fact that delegates in Kumasi also approved all fourteen proposed amendments to the party’s constitution, reportedly including one that makes the flagbearer the leader of the party, and did so despite a call by the Acting National Chairman to defer the exercise because delegates would have little time to consider the amendments properly.
A national executive should not simply be an extension of the flag bearer’s office. A political party needs people who can challenge, advise, disagree, organise, mobilise and provide independent political judgement. It needs people with respect, character, credibility, experience and institutional standing.
It has such people. The tragedy is that some of those people appear to have been overlooked.
A leader who will always agree with the person above him may be convenient, but convenience is not necessarily leadership. Political parties need people who can tell their own side difficult truths before those truths are told to them by voters at the ballot box.
The NPP’s problem before 2024 was not that it lacked people who could defend the party. It was that too many people appeared unwilling or unable to confront the realities confronting the government and the party. If the lesson from that experience is to elect more people whose principal qualification is that they can work harmoniously with the flag bearer, then I fear the party has learned the wrong lesson.
- The NPP needs people who can meet the NDC boot for boot. Really?
There was also considerable conversation about the need for people who could meet the NDC “boot for boot.”
I find that thinking troubling.
The NPP did not lose the 2024 election because it lacked people who could fight the NDC. It did not lose because its executives were insufficiently aggressive. It did not lose because there were not enough people capable of exchanging political insults or responding to political attacks. It lost because enough Ghanaians were dissatisfied with the government and the direction of the country.
Building a political party is much bigger than preparing for an election. If the principal qualification for leadership becomes the ability to fight the NDC, then the party risks turning its national executives into a permanent opposition response team. That is not party building.
The NPP needs people who can rebuild its structures, reconnect it with communities, develop policy, strengthen internal democracy, attract young people, rebuild public confidence and create a compelling reason for Ghanaians to vote for the party again.
The next election cannot simply be won by fighting the NDC harder. It has to be won by convincing Ghanaians that the NPP has changed.
In fairness
It is only right to say what can be said on the other side.
Delegates rewarded continuity, with an incumbent General Secretary re-elected by the largest margin of the day and a former General Secretary returned as chairman. That may reflect genuine confidence in experience, and experience is not a vice. A party that has just lost badly may reasonably want steady organisers who know the machinery, and it would be unfair to suggest that Mr Boadu or Mr Kodua cannot grow into the task. Dr Bawumia’s insistence that defeated aspirants remain part of the campaign is also exactly the right instinct.
But experience cuts both ways. Familiar faces can bring skill, and they can also bring the habits that helped to produce the last defeat. The test is not who sits in the offices. The test is what they do differently.
Political parties need leadership, not merely political combatants
A political party is an institution. Its leadership therefore has responsibilities that go beyond winning the next election. Good political leadership requires institutional memory, strategic thinking, political maturity, courage, integrity and the ability to listen. It requires people who can disagree without destroying the organisation and support their candidate without surrendering their judgement.
The NPP needs to rebuild its relationship with the Ghanaian people. It needs to understand what happened in government, why public confidence deteriorated and what must change before asking Ghanaians for another mandate. It also needs to understand that the objective cannot simply be to defeat the NDC in 2028. The objective should be to become a better political organisation, one capable of deserving another opportunity to govern Ghana.
Five tests worth watching
Rather than judging this leadership by its speeches, Ghanaians and party members can judge it by what it does in the months ahead. Does it publish an honest account of what went wrong in 2024? Does it create space for its own members to criticise the party without being treated as enemies? Does it bring the losing camps of both the January primary and the October elections into real decision-making, rather than merely onto platforms? Does it build serious policy capacity, rather than a communications machine? And does it reconnect with the constituencies and young voters it lost, in person and with humility?
If the answer to those questions is yes, I will gladly say I was wrong.
My verdict, therefore, is simple.
I believe the NPP could have done better with this national leadership election. The party has enough experienced, respected and capable people to have produced a leadership structure that went beyond questions of who can work with whom, who can fight the NDC and who can provide political protection for the flag bearer.
I hope I am wrong. But based on the outcome and the arguments that surrounded the election, I am not yet convinced that the NPP is ready to rebuild the party and move beyond the 2024 defeat.
They have elected their leaders. The harder task now is to prove that they have also learned their lessons.
And until they do, the question will remain: are they preparing to win an election, or are they actually preparing to rebuild a political party?