No sooner had the New Patriotic Party (NPP) fully taken the reins of government in January 2017 than they hinted on their overarching plan of running the country. The party was going to go big on everything. After all, that was what had returned them to office after eight years in opposition.
What followed afterwards will be outlandish claims and superlatives of achievements that will infuriate Ghanaians and lead to the most disastrous electoral performance by a major political party since the 1990s.
Members of the New Patriotic Party and indeed government officials made it a point to remind us that the Akufo-Addo government was the best since independence.
For any topical questions raised on matters ranging from corruption through incompetence to economic difficulties, the NPP faithful premised their responses on being the best government in the history of the country.
Whether it was sheer lack of inhibition or the convenient existence in their own reality, it is hard to say. But they said it so often that they were themselves convinced that it was true.
The president led the carol of self-praise. As recent as late November during an event to commission the Flower Pot interchange in Accra, he repeated his claim that his government had constructed more roads and interchanges than any other government.
Then there was the NPP’s flag bearer, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, who was actually doing the active campaigning. There was hardly an achievement he asserted that the government had attained without his “than any other government” touch ups. It was upon such historic gains that he had mounted a herculean challenge to ‘break the 8’.
Speaking at Accra Senior High School’s 100th year anniversary, the vice-president said of the Akufo-Addo-Bawumia government, “We have achieved many significant things which are the first in the history of the country.”
Dr. Bawumia’s running mate, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, was sure to remind Ghanaians on the campaign trail that “no administration has governed the country and commenced the construction of 111 hospitals”. He also claimed: “No government in this country has built schools like Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.”
The party communicators followed suit, articulating to the people how lucky they were to have such a historic government that was delivering for them.
It stopped becoming about the little kitchen table issues. The party of the great elephant was now playing for the history books. Then the electoral ‘tsunami’ struck.
Across the country, citizens had had it to their necks and sent a strong message to ‘the best government since independence’.
The remarkable transformation agenda that was being touted by the NPP was not felt in the pocket. People were suffocated by the high inflation rate and free fall of the cedi’s value against the United States dollar.
They had seen enough. The party of superlatives suffered what is undoubtedly an elephant-size defeat. In playing for the history books with superlatives of ‘bests’ and ‘mosts,’ they had dug themselves into the steepest political hole.
The Electoral Commission in its declaration of the presidential results noted that with 267 out of 276 constituency returns, former President Mahama had polled over 6.2 million votes. Dr. Bawumia, who had urged voters to show up and vote in their numbers because he wanted a “big gap” did get a big gap. He obtained about 1.6 million votes less than the candidate he was convinced of beating.
The least said about the parliamentary results the better. The NPP is on course to record the most catastrophic wipeout in decades as certain areas long regarded as strongholds have turned to the umbrella.
The question remains: How is it possible that the “most consequential” vice president in our nation’s history could spearhead “most historic” changes and still be uncompetitive?
It is simple. They refused to believe the evidence before their eyes. The evidence of anger, difficulty and despair. As if that were not enough, they cloaked these real-life challenges with superlatives and self-honour which in certain moments were just tone-deaf and they suffered terribly at the polls.
They were dangling positive superlatives and historic records about only to be upended by political destruction, the likes of which has not been seen in recent times.
So it is true. The NPP is the party of superlatives and on December 7 it lost power, superlatively.
