The main cause of the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) recent electoral loss, according to Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, also known as NAPO, the party’s running partner in the general election of 2024, is internal party strife.
In the general election held on December 7, 2024, the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) won a landslide victory, allowing John Mahama to return to the presidency after the NPP failed to secure a third consecutive term.
In an interview with Umaru Sanda, NAPO cited the party’s long-standing governance problems as a major reason why its result at the polls was poor.
He maintained that the loss had deeper roots in unresolved internal tensions and was not just due to economic difficulties.
NAPO emphasized that these governance issues have been a recurring problem for the party, citing past experiences where the NPP had to learn valuable lessons from its mistakes.
“MPs were begging people to go and vote, but they said they were not going to vote. That is not about economic mismanagement, it is about a deep-seated problem the party hasn’t addressed.
“You can’t imagine yourself to be a master of everything at every time. There are certain events that you may not be able to do anything about and it will hit you. It is not just the NPP that has suffered that.
“In 1992, we had zero representation in parliament. The country and the party learned. Because in the said year, the presidential and parliamentary elections when the party lost, they wrote a stolen verdict and they decided that they were going to boycott parliament.
“It was a party decision. Subsequently, that same party met and said they shouldn’t have boycotted parliament. They said it was better for us to go with the few seats we won than to boycott. So, the party changed, and the country changed,”
