The 2024 New Patriotic Party (NPP) running mate, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, says one hard truth has become clear to him after months of political reflection.
According to him, the NPP under the Nana Akufo-Addo government simply did not listen enough.
The former Education and Energy Minister believes that failure cost the party the trust of the people, with severe consequences.
“One thing I’ve concluded in the last 10 months is that there was a broken trust between citizens and government. The trust that was broken hurt so much so that we saw the results so broken,” he said on Joy News’ PM Express.
Asked by host Evans Mensah what caused that rupture, Dr Opoku Prempeh was direct.
“We didn’t listen enough; we assumed a lot of things we shouldn’t have assumed,” he admitted.
He added that even their sense of purpose as a government came under strain.
Dr Prempeh argued that the global environment made the period even more difficult, saying the world had been shaken on multiple fronts.
“We had gone through the West, global economic climate, medically and economically or health-wise,” he said.
According to him, governments across the world were swept up in a storm, with many overturned, leaving only autocratic regimes able to withstand the shocks.
He highlighted how dramatically the global economy had shifted and pointed to staggering changes in basic costs.
“A container from China that cost $1,200 logistic-wise had risen to $14,000. People’s lifetime savings have been wiped out,” he said.
He added that the human toll was equally devastating.
“People had died in their droves that had never been seen before, without a military crisis or World War. So a lot of things that happened.”
Through it all, Dr Prempeh maintained that despite the difficult global context, their biggest failure was not listening to the public early enough — a failure he believes paved the way for everything that followed.
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