The 2024 Presidential Candidate of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), Nana Sarpong Kumankuma, has described the dominant performance of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the parliamentary elections as a shocking development.
She noted that the presidential election results which resulted in former President John Mahama’s landslide victory was not as noteworthy as how the elections to the legislature went.
Ms. Kumankuma, who was speaking on GH One’s Hard Talk with Lily Mohammed noted that she was surprised the governing New Patriotic Party could not maintain grip on areas long regarded as their strongholds.
“I was shocked. I really knew things can change but not to the extent that it went in terms of the parliamentary defeat.
“Let us be objective here. In 2020, about 6.2 million which was what NDC got which was again what our current president-elect got. Now 200,000 added is not surprising. I was even expecting more, based on the anger and frustration of the Ghanaian.
“However, if anybody had told me that the wind of change in the area of parliamentary can ever go the way it’s gone, I would have been shocked,” she remarked.
The NDC has swept over 180 seats and look set to command a two-third majority in the House for the first time since 1993.
She said Mr. Mahama had the “opportunity” to help the youth of the country with his second coming. To achieve this. she argued that youth employment could be well tackled when the government makes use of the decentralization structures already in place, rather than overeliance on the central government to make change happen.
The contemporary Nkrumaist leader called on the president-elect to follow through on his promise to introduce constitutional reforms to sustain Ghana’s democracy.
“This is what we’re asking: You have the authority and power to have the review of the constitution that we need. Let it happen today,” she said of the constitutional review process which started over a decade ago.