Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah says the Akufo-Addo administration is pleased with the outcome of the 2020 Presidential elections despite the narrow margin between the President-elect and his closest contender, John Dramani Mahama of the National Democratic Congress.

According to Mr. Oppong Nkrumah, the margin of votes that went in favour of the incumbent president represents a significant number of people who still had confidence in the administration of the Akufo-Addo led government despite certain tough decisions they have had to take and consequent opposition they have faced from those decisions.

He cited the government’s stance pertaining to the anti-galamsey fight as well as the financial sector clean-up that had affected several financial institutions as some of the tough decisions that had raised so much opposition towards the incumbent government thus leading to the narrow margin.

President-elect Akufo-Addo was able to garner a little over 500,000 more votes than the NDC’s John Dramani Mahama.

“And that for us represents a significant margin out of this new cohort especially when you juxtapose that with the fact that going into this election, there were very strong organised groups of persons who had been affected by some of the tough decisions that this administration has had to take announcing boldly that they were going to organise coalitions to vote against this administration.”

He explained that these coalitions had indeed carried out their threats as was witnessed in the just-ended elections by voting massively against the NPP government.

“For persons involved in illegal small scale mining, those in the galamsey areas, they were quite clear that if the President even attempted to fight it or as he was going through the process, was fighting it, they were going to ensure that they would vote against him.

“Check particularly the parliamentary results in what you’d call the galamsey areas; Prestea, Huni Valley and all of those areas and you’d see that true to the threat that was advertised, ‘if you fight galamsey we would fight you’, you can extrapolate and see how that affected us in the galamsey areas,” he explained.

He also mentioned the ire of those affected by the financial sector resolution and their demand for a 100% reimbursement of their investments or else will ensure that the Akufo-Addo led administration lost the 2020 elections as a factor for the small margin.

“Take the financial sector resolution, and particularly those in asset management companies, who boldly announced and called on their members, hundreds of thousands of them to vote against the administration to compel the election into a second round so that government will be forced to pay them 100%,

“You’ll recall government put out a payment programme; banks, non-banking financial institutions and asset managers and said about 50,000 per head or so, and their call was that pay all now else we’ll vote against you,” he said.

He continued, “Now if you’re a government you have a choice, do you break the bank because you want to win an election or you maintain fiscal responsibility looking at all your numbers?

“And you can check the numbers of persons – I mean the banks alone were about 4.6 million customers, check the various categories. So if you have such a strong cohort saying that if you don’t pay all the money, if you don’t break the bank for us now, we’d vote against you, you can begin to look at its potential impact on margins.”

According to Oppong Nkrumah, taking into consideration the strong opposition they had faced before the election, they were rather very pleased with the incumbent government’s win.

“So we consider this to be a very good result at the end of the day because we did not have to break the bank or succumb to some of these threats just because we wanted to win an election.

“And we think that in the balance the good people of Ghana have understood why government has had to go through some of these decisions and steps and the next results has been good for Ghana,” he said.