Poll: Ghana’s main opposition leader is expected to win the presidential election
A poll released on Monday put John Dramani Mahama, the leader of the main opposition in Ghana, ahead of Muhamudu Bawumia, the candidate of the ruling party, in the race for president in December.
Three candidates are running for president on December 7: former president Mahama, 65, and current vice president Bawumia, 60. They want to replace President Nana Akufo-Addo, who is leaving her job in January after two terms as leader of the gold- and cocoa-producing country. Eleven more people are also running.
Global InfoAnalytics, a research group based in Accra, released poll data on Monday that showed Mahama with 52% of the vote and Bawumia with 41.3%. The poll has a 1.9% margin of error.
It showed that voters were mostly worried about jobs, the economy, schools, and infrastructure.
Mahama put a lot of money into infrastructure while he was president from 2012 to 2017—a time when he was criticized for power outages and unstable economies. His government was also accused of corruption, but Mahama was never personally blamed.
He is running again as a candidate for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), which is the major opposition party.
An economist and former central banker, Bawumia is running for the New Patriotic Party (NPP), which is currently in power and has been through Ghana’s worst economic crisis in a generation.
Both candidates have laid out plans to make the business stronger and make people’s lives better.
Ghana, which makes cocoa and is the second-largest cocoa grower in the world, stopped paying most of its $30 billion foreign debt in 2022 after years of borrowing too much.
The International Monetary Fund gave Akufo-Addo’s government a $3 billion bailout over three years in 2023. The money is now almost ready to be sent out, but there are some painful steps that need to be taken first.
The Economist Intelligence Unit thought the NDC would win in October because of the NPP’s track record with the economy. That month, Fitch Solutions also put out a similar prediction.
Both Mahama and Bawumia are from northern Ghana, which used to be a base for the NDC but is now being taken over by the NPP.
Alidu Seidu, a political scientist at the University of Ghana, said that the two candidates were likely to be very close in the race.
He said that the results were hard to guess and that there would probably be a run-off vote.
In the history of Ghana’s democracy, no party has ever won more than two terms in a row.
