The Harsh Reality For The Ghanaian Voter On December 7th | Features

The electorate in Ghana have to select a President amongst the13 candidates, although the real choice is between the two protagonists of the 2 main parties, the NDC and NPP. After a disturbing 2 years of grappling with the Covid 19 virus, Ghana’s economy has seen a major downturn with the government scuttling to the International Monetary fund(IMF) for help.

In the midst of such adversity, you will expect the former President who is the opposition (NDC) leader, John Mahama to be the obvious choice, but recent polls suggest the NPP Presidential Candidate, Vice PresidentBawumia is making a great case to be elected.

What is intriguing about Mahama and Bawumia, is that, even though every facet of government activity has been severely affected, especially with its inability to meet its payment obligations, culminating in Bond holders having to take a haircut, whilst projects have stalled or been abandoned, Mahama has failed to gain any real advantage in the polls.

The former President, John Mahama has an appalling track record, coupled with a disjointed manifesto. As President, he fulfilled about 28% of his electoral promises, didn’t introduce any social intervention programs during his tenure and subjected Ghanaians to a 4 year energy crisis which destabilised many businesses, thus causing high youth unemployment.

The manifesto of the NDC seems to lack clarity, with confusion about their main policy, the ‘24 hour Economy’, a policy agenda that splits opinion due to the NDC and their communicators inability to explain it to the masses.

The Vice President, Bawumia alongside his government, on the otherhand, have chalked some successes during their tenure. They have implemented the Free Senior High School policy, which has impacted virtually every family in the country. A policy that has been transformational in terms of allowing young people to pursue further education, rather than walking the streets aimlessly and avoiding the risk of child pregnancy, a situation that has dramatically reduced.  

The biggest challenge facing the youth in Ghana is unemployment. Both candidates have featured employment as a resolution in their manifestoes, to alleviate the young people of their woes. Mahama is proposing to train one million people in coding to support the Business Processing Outsourcing and the Knowledge Processing Outsourcing sectors and will create 300,000 tech jobs. The proposition from Bawumia is similar and he is hoping to train about a million young people, with the hope of making them globally competitive, to ensure they can take on remote jobs all over the world.

What makes Bawumia’s digital credentials stand out, compared to Mahama, is how he envisions digitization and the fact that he has made it the underlying objective of his policy proposals. He aims to utilize digitization to root out corruption in our institutions, to build on the Ghana Card to ensure he designs a credit scoring system to provide credit to the masses, our tax system will be digitized to enable businesses pay directly to the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), we have already seen digitization in our utilities’ payment systems, at the ports, the passport office and the DVLA.

The digital revolution being postulated by Bamumia makes him a formidable candidate, as we can visualize hope in how he is preparing Ghana to embrace the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). Unlike the myopic 24 hour Economy advocated by Mahama and the NDC, where they are looking at creating factories to employ people, digitization looks to the future and aims to provide opportunities in the service sector.

Although we can safely say there is currently a dark cloud over the Ghanaian economy, it is poised for a take off with regards to digitization. It is essential that the Ghanaian votermakes the right choice in selecting the candidate that can propel us to the next level of development. Africa was not at the table during the Industrial Revolution, but we are witnessing the advent of the fourth Industrial Revolution and we ought to prepare our country to embrace the benefits that it brings forth.

We cannot allow emotions to set in to determine how we vote, due to the challenges and disappointments we have encountered with the present government. These were largely external factors, propagated by the Covid 19 epidemic and the Ukraine war. We are now seeing a turnaround, withrecent statistics showing the country’s GDP grew by 6.9% in the last quarter. The harsh reality is that, after 8 years of the NPP, they still provide the best option for Ghana and Bawumia stands head and shoulders above Mahama in any sphere of activity.