Former Vice President and 2024 flag bearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, says the NDC did not win the 2024 elections; the NPP lost it.

Speaking to members of the Young Executive Forum (YEF) during his Thank You Tour in London, Dr Bawumia attributed the NPP’s defeat to voter apathy and a massive drop in turnout from the party’s traditional base.

“The issue was on the NPP side,” he said.

“Our votes declined by 2.1 million relative to 2020, so that is where the problem was. 2.1 million people who voted for us in 2020 did not turn up to vote in 2024.”

According to Dr Bawumia, if those voters had come out again, the election result would have been very different.

“If these 2.1 million people had come out to vote for us, like they did in 2020, we would have won the election hands down.”

He insisted the National Democratic Congress (NDC) didn’t secure victory on merit.

“That’s why I said that this vote wasn’t won by the NDC; it was lost by the NPP. They didn’t win the vote. We gave this election away, so to speak. We lost it by not turning up to vote.”

Dr Bawumia described the pattern of apathy as unusually widespread.

“What happened was very pervasive across almost every constituency in Ghana,” he explained.

“People were saying they were not coming out to vote. Our parliamentary candidates, polling station executives, were trying to get people out to the polling stations, but they kept getting this message: We are not voting, we are not voting.”

He said the level of voter disengagement appeared orchestrated.

“This behaviour was so similar, across from Axim to Zebila, the whole gamut. That behaviour was something that we had never seen before in an election.

"And it is almost as though they had a meeting before and decided that on the day we are not coming out. Unfortunately, we didn’t get wind of this meeting.”

Providing figures to back his claim, Bawumia said six regions — Greater Accra, Ashanti, Eastern, Western, Bono, and Central — accounted for 84% of the 6.1 million registered voters who failed to cast their ballots in 2024.

“Greater Accra region, you had 571,000 people who did not vote. Ashanti region, you had 429,000. Eastern region, 258,000. Western region, 164,000. Bono region, about 100,000.”

“These are also the places where, even in the 2024 election, we got our most votes from. These are generally our strongholds,” he said.

In a moment of stark reflection, Bawumia admitted the decline was almost national.

“The decline in votes occurred in 15 of the 16 regions of Ghana. We have 16 regions, but in 15 regions, NPP votes went down.

"The only region in Ghana where the NPP votes went up in 2024 was the North East region, which is the region I come from. That’s the only region in Ghana where our votes went up. In every other region, our votes went down. And that is a big issue for us.”

Dr Bawumia’s comment is his most direct public admission yet of the party’s internal collapse at the polls.

He did not accuse the Electoral Commission of wrongdoing, nor the opposition of electoral manipulation. His message was simple: the NPP lost because its own supporters stayed home.