By: Jibril Salifu, Communications Officer, North London chapter, NPP UK
I served as one of Richmond Mensah’s campaign coordinator in the 2026 NPP UK Branch Chairmanship election, and this is the story I am best placed to tell, not the vote count itself, but what Richmond did in the hours after we lost.
On the 8th of August 2026, all sixteen chapters of NPP UK came together to elect new leadership. It was closer than most people expected, turnout above 90%, and just sixty-five votes separating first and second place for chairperson. Richmond was one of three men standing that day.
The real story here is what he did the moment he found out he had lost, and the campaign that got him to 201 votes in the first place.
At half past three in the afternoon on the 8th of August 2026, we were already at the Dominion Centre in Wood Green, the venue where the results were being collated. Polls closed at 4pm. Before 5pm, our own collation already told us what the official result would later confirm. Richmond Mensah had lost the race for the NPP UK Branch Chairmanship. Nobody else in the branch knew that yet. We did.
What he did next is the reason I am writing this.
He did not wait for the Branch Elections Committee, who would not conclude their own count until close to midnight, to do the right thing. Before 5pm that afternoon, he sent out a statement conceding, quietly, without anyone asking him to. Still at the Dominion Centre, he found Andy Owusu and congratulated him in person, hours before the result was even officially announced. He did it in the same room, within the hour, while the count that mattered most to him was still fresh in his own hands.
I watched this happen from as close as anyone could. There is a saying that a man’s true face shows itself not when he wins, but when he loses. I have turned that saying over in my head many times since that afternoon.
As a campaign team, we knew going in that this would not be easy. We were up against Andy Owusu, making his third attempt at the chairmanship after years serving as NPP UK’s Youth Patron, and Isaac Appiah-Kubi, the young, calm, and energetic former chairman of West London NPP UK. Unlike Andy, who had never held a chairmanship before this race, Appiah-Kubi had, and of the three campaigns, his was without question the loudest, the most aggressive, and the most talked about. By the time voting day came, his name was on more lips across the branch than either of ours.
No one gave us much of a chance. Most people assumed our run would be little more than a formality before Andy or Appiah-Kubi took the chairmanship, and I understood why they thought that. What they did not see was the number of weekends Richmond gave up for this, chapter meetings, community events, visitations, one after another, weeks where I genuinely cannot remember him having a Saturday or a Sunday to himself. We all love an underdog story, and by the time the votes were counted, second place out of three, 201 of them, in a race almost nobody expected us to make close, that work had done exactly what it was supposed to do.
Some of that steadiness, I think, comes from what he does for a living. Richmond is a Health and Care Professions Council-registered social worker with over fifteen years in children’s social care, much of it in safeguarding, child protection, and court work across several UK local authorities. He currently works with Plymouth City Council, and before that held senior safeguarding roles with Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire county councils. It is not a career that rewards people who lose their composure under pressure. Chairing statutory meetings, managing care proceedings, sitting across from families in crisis, all of that asks for a particular kind of steadiness, the same steadiness I watched him carry into a chairmanship loss.
“Double Chairman” describes something literal. From 2017 to September 2025, Richmond was Chairman of the Milton Keynes Men Association. He became Chairman of NPP UK’s Milton Keynes chapter in early 2019, after contesting as Vice Chairman in 2018. For more than six years, he held both titles at once, two organisations, two sets of members, two sets of responsibilities, run in parallel. That is where the name actually comes from: two real chairmanships, carried simultaneously.
His path within the party did not start there either. He came in as a Chapter Organiser in 2014, contested as Vice Chairman in 2018, and stepped up to lead the chapter in early 2019, when he was confirmed as its substantive Chairman. He was also one of the people who helped revive the Milton Keynes chapter back in 2013, when it needed rebuilding from close to nothing. Whatever else this election result says, it does not erase over a decade of that kind of work.
His campaign for the branch chairmanship arrived with a written manifesto, “Rebuilding NPP UK: A Blueprint for Growth, Welfare and Unity,” nine pillars covering everything from membership growth to a welfare fund for members going through hardship. Whether those ideas find their way into the branch’s future is now somebody else’s decision to make, not mine to claim. But he showed up to this race with a plan, not just an ambition.
His record outside the UK tells a similar story. He has travelled to Ghana more than once to support national campaigns, including a self-funded tour across the Western Region in 2020, and he helped organise community infrastructure support, water and sanitation projects among them, for parliamentary candidates that same year.
In 2024, he was back on the ground again, supporting a candidate through the parliamentary primaries and campaigning across several regions.
The numbers from the 8th of August tell their own part of the story too. Richmond finished with 201 votes, 30.5% of the valid votes cast, the second-highest total of the three candidates. His home chapter of Milton Keynes gave him 52 of its 62 votes, easily his strongest showing anywhere, and he also carried Birmingham, Leeds, Swindon and Hull, five chapters in total, at an average of 40 votes in each one he won, a higher average than Andy managed across the eight chapters he carried. Richmond did not receive a single vote in West London, and that number deserves its own explanation rather than a shrug.
West London belonged to Appiah-Kubi, the chapter’s own former chairman, and Team DC made a deliberate call early in the campaign not to contest it. He had built that chapter into something close to a fortress, and he defended it well. I admired him for it. When the final count showed him sweeping all thirty-nine votes there, it did not surprise me. It confirmed what we had already decided weeks earlier, that the ground was his to hold, not ours to contest. Telford was a different matter, a chapter we simply could not break into, and Andy took it by a landslide of his own.
None of that changes the arithmetic of the 8th of August. Richmond Mensah lost the chairmanship, fairly and by a clear margin, and I have written elsewhere about exactly how that result came together. But an election result and a man’s character are not the same measurement. The same steadiness that lets him sit across from a family in crisis and stay clear-headed is the steadiness that showed up that afternoon, and sent out a statement before anyone asked him to, and crossed a room to shake the hand of the man who beat him.
None of it happens without the people who stood behind him. The campaign team, the advisors, the supporters who knocked on doors and made calls and gave up their own weekends alongside him, all of it was carried by more shoulders than his alone.
And behind all of it were his wife and family, who carried a weight of their own, the missed evenings, the empty seat at the table, the quiet cost of a campaign that never shows up in any vote count. Whatever this election gave or did not give Richmond, none of it would have been possible without them, and they have earned their share of thanks as much as he has.
I also want to thank Richmond personally, for the opportunity to serve as a member of his campaign. It was a privilege I did not take lightly.
I know Double Chairman well, and I have no doubt he will support Chairman Andy however he can and help him succeed. Standing for chairman was never really the point.
The real point was always the same, seeing Dr. Bawumia become President and NPP win Ghana’s 2028 elections, and that has not changed just because someone else got the title.
