Senior Advisor to the 2025 Bawumia Campaign, Anthony Abayifaa Karbo, has attributed the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) defeat in the 2024 general elections to a combination of domestic economic pressures, illegal mining activities and wider global economic challenges.

Speaking on Tuesday, January 6, Mr Karbo dismissed suggestions that the party’s choice of Dr Mahamudu Bawumia as its presidential candidate was a mistake.

He argued that global electoral trends in 2024 showed that many incumbent governments seeking re-election suffered heavy losses.

“I’m strongly opposed to that view,” he said. “If you have done a post-mortem of the 2024 polls across the world, you would have known that all or many incumbent governments that were going for a re-election in that particular year lost and lost heavily.”

Mr Karbo explained that Ghana’s electoral outcome could not be separated from the difficult economic climate at the time, both locally and internationally.

He pointed to the impact of the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP), the persistent problem of illegal mining, known as galamsey, and other economic headwinds as key factors that shaped voter sentiment.

“We were also reeling under the huge economic problems in Ghana,” he noted in an interview with Channel One TV.

“You recall the DDEP, galamsey, and all these things added to the difficulties we had in the election. We cannot run away from that fact.”

He stressed that these challenges affected public reception to the NPP’s campaign message, regardless of the policy ideas presented.

According to him, economic hardship dulled voter attention and enthusiasm, making it difficult for the party to gain traction.

“And it doesn’t make the candidate a wrong choice,” Mr Karbo added. “Ghanaians were tuned off. With all the good ideas we talked about, we didn’t get the attention.”

He maintained that Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, the former Vice President of Ghana, should not be blamed for an outcome driven largely by broader economic and political conditions.