Former Subin MP and NPP General Secretary hopeful Eugene Boakye Antwi has attributed the party’s heavy defeat in the 2024 general election partly to voter apathy, saying “arrogance of power” pushed many of its supporters away from the polls.
According to him, the NPP’s defeat was not primarily because the National Democratic Congress (NDC) significantly increased its support, but because a large number of voters who could have supported the NPP chose not to vote.
He cited figures showing that about 2.1 million registered voters did not participate in the 2024 election.
“Because about almost 3 million people didn’t vote. Because about a million, the EC registered about a million voters. But the 2.1, that didn’t vote,” he said in an interview on Metro TV’s Good Afternoon Ghana on Tuesday, September 1.
Mr Boakye Antwi argued that many of those who stayed away from the polls were not necessarily NDC supporters.
“When they got so good, they didn’t go and vote for the NDC. They just abstained from the election. Because these are our people, that’s why they didn’t vote for NDC,” he said.
He said the relatively small increase in the NDC’s vote compared with the previous election was evidence that the NPP’s problem was largely voter disengagement.
“And NDC didn’t increase its votes by less than 200,000 votes from 2020,” he said.
Boakye Antwi said the reasons for the apathy included dissatisfaction with the governing party and what he described as “the arrogance of power”.
“It clearly shows that people didn’t vote. And they didn’t vote because of apathy, because of the arrogance of power, and all those symptoms that make a government unpopular. That was what Ghanaians voted against,” he said.
Governments lose elections
The NPP General Secretary hopeful also argued that the party should take greater responsibility for its defeat rather than crediting the opposition entirely for its electoral success.
Drawing from what he described as the Westminster tradition, he said governments lose elections because they are ultimately responsible for the conditions under which they seek re-election.
“You control everything. The intelligence, the resources,” he said.
“Opposition will just make the necessary noise… But you, as an example, you are the one who is losing the election for the opposition.”
He said the NPP’s 2024 defeat should therefore be seen as a rejection of how the party and its government had conducted themselves in office.
“A lot of things went against us,” he said, pointing to issues including the economy and the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme.
Mr Boakye Antwi said he would prefer the party to learn from the scale of the defeat and avoid repeating the mistakes that led to it.
The NPP will elect new national executives on October 3, 2026, in Kumasi.
