Bawumia should give us a break!

Within 30 days in 2025, Bawumia’s popularity rating among New Patriotic Party (NPP) supporters has surged by as much as 10 per cent. 

Two polls established the 2024 flag bearer’s unassailable superiority within the NPP ― from 48 per cent in March to 57 per cent in April.

Why should these figures matter to Bawumia?

Simple: the feat has happened without any conscious or deliberate intervention by him with the intent to boost his standing.

He did nothing to deserve it.

It is grace to him. 

But a beneficiary of grace should not speak the way he did at the NPP Takoradi Thank You Tour.

As a politician, he cannot but show his teeth some of the time.

He should be able to take a blow to the jaw and give one as well.

But no blow from him should be a dirty one or below the belt. 

In Takoradi, he was hitting below the belt. He was trying to look good while splashing dirt on the former President.

To petty minds, and in the eyes of his so-called strategists, he may have looked angelic, but that one act is nearly cancelling out all the good deeds he has been known for.

Going forward, it will be in his interest to remember that good deeds without thought of personal gain have their own way of blessing the giver.

Without his stir, the concession speech delivered less than 24 hours after the close of polls counted for Bawumia as righteousness and Allah, who uses men to deliver blessings, has used InfoAnalytics to place him ahead of both hidden and known Election 2028 competitors.

On TV, I heard Miracles Aboagye’s defence of his boss’s Takoradi performance.

I disagreed with him and I thought I should use this page to warn Bawumia that his future in politics will not lie in Goebbelian propaganda. 

Propaganda

Paul Joseph Goebbels, with a PhD in Philology, had perfected the art of propaganda.

Master in the use of language for persuasion, this man, one of Adolf Hitler's closest hatchet men, used propaganda for evil. 

During his Takoradi Thank-you tour, Dr Bawumia cited several factors he believed contributed to his 2024 defeat: arrogance of power, high cost of living, failure to reshuffle government appointees, the controversial Electronic Transfer Levy (E-Levy), and the painful “haircut”.

In typical Goebbelian style, Miracles is mightily attempting to persuade Ghanaians to disbelieve what their ears heard.

To get to that truth, I will ask him to do a poll asking the people, “What did Bawumia’s speech at Takoradi mean to you?”

Miracles said Bawumia was using “we” and that meant that he was blaming the NPP as a whole, not Akufo-Addo alone.

In the silence of his thoughts, he should revise his notes about the intended effects of communication and re-rate the message of his boss to the party. 

Arrogance

Ghanaians have their operational definition of “arrogance of power” and how it manifested between 2017 and 2024. Using “we” in the particular instance of the former President’s adamantine refusal to fire Ken Ofori-Atta, as requested by his own party MPs, couldn’t, by any stretch of anybody’s imagination, be interpreted to mean sharing culpability.

Every Ghanaian knows it was Akufo-Addo who was ordering chiefs to get up from their stools to greet him; telling Akumfi that he would not channel development to them because they didn’t vote for his parliamentary candidate.

The mind of the ordinary Ghanaian who heard Bawumia using the expression, “arrogance of power”, went immediately to Akufo-Addo. To them, Bawumia was placing the blame for the defeat on the ex-President’s head.

Ghanaians know that only one person, in the whole of the NPP 2016-2024 era, can be blamed for the failure to reshuffle government appointees.

When they heard Bawumia speak at Takoradi, they heard the 2024 flag bearer nailing Akufo-Addo. 

Bawumia had long been known to have been opposed to the controversial Electronic Transfer Levy (E-Levy).

To mention it as a defeat factor is doing only one thing: telling NPP that he wouldn’t have lost the election, but for the man who punished Ghanaians with E Levy.

Nobody heard Bawumia speak against the notorious “haircut”, nor was he ever heard saying no to our going for an IMF bail-out.

The 2024 elections are over, and anybody who blames the NPP defeat on “haircut” can be heard blaming, not “we”, but Akufo-Addo and Ofori-Atta.

Ask the ordinary Ghanaian what went through their minds when they heard Bawumia say “Three days to the election, we increased fuel price”.

Whom did they have in mind?

Advice

Going forward into 2028, my advice to campaign communicators like Miracles is one: rehearse the candidate for every public address.

To fail to do that is like the greatest film director, whose film no one understands.

Can he go to every cinema house and run commentary?

I remember Rawlings as the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) Chairman.

Whenever he spoke, spin doctors were sent out later to give us “the real” meaning of what he said. 

The writer is the Executive Director,
Centre for Communication and Culture.
E-mail: ashonenimil@gmail.com