President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has stated that he is upbeat about the prospects of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in breaking the eight-year rotational power jinx between the two largest political parties in the country – NPP and NDC.
According to him, the NPP almost made the target a reality in the 2008 elections but narrowly missed it.
Nana Akufo-Addo explained in an August 8 interview with North Star radio in Tamale that he as the candidate of the NPP in the first round of the 2008 elections was in the lead and only needed 23,000 votes to be declared president-elect to succeed former President John Agyekum Kufuor.
However, that did not happen as the late President John Evans Atta Mills flipped the coin in the second round to eventually emerge as the winner of the elections.
The President said the NPP has since drawn lessons from their defeat at the polls and looks forward to a decisive victory in the 2024 general elections as the party attempts to make history as the first political party under the 4th Republic to secure a third consecutive term in office.
“A lot of people are forgetting that in 2008, we almost broke the 8 then. The elections of 2008 which is the first one with me as a candidate of the NPP, I won the first round and in fact, I was short of outright victory by 23,000 votes. Very very narrow. 23,000 votes should have gone the other way round wherever and I would have been president in the first round in 2008. It didn’t happen.
“We went into a second round and in that second round, the NPP lost by 40,000 votes. President Mills was elected with 50.01% of the overall votes. It is the narrowest margin of victory in any presidential contest of the 4th Republic. That tells you the NPP was extremely close to making that statement [of breaking the 8] as far back as that (time),” President Akufo-Addo said.
“We have all learnt our lessons from what happened. Those that came from our own side, the problems that we had ourselves and those that were external to our party. We are determined this time round that not only will it be a victory, it will be a decisive victory because this National Democratic Congress, they should spend more time in opposition so they can organize themselves better for the future of Ghana than what they are today,” he further stated.
The 2024 general elections is expected to be a keenly contested one between NPP and NDC.
While the NPP looks at extending it stay in power in what it has christened as ‘break the 8’, the NDC is also lacing up it boots to wrestle power from the governing party.
President Akufo-Addo