Close your eyes, gentle reader, and try to see it. A woman on the forecourt of the Jubilee House on inauguration day, right hand raised, taking the oath as President of the Republic of Ghana. Hold the picture. Did it come easily, or did some part of your mind reach for a reason it could not be, wondering quietly whether the country is ready?

That hesitation, that small flinch in the national imagination, is the most honest thing in our politics right now. And it is worth examining, because we have built an entire machinery to put women into the room and almost nothing to put one at the head of it. We are very good at the first task. We have barely attempted the second. And this issue is about the gap between the two; about why a woman can rise to within one step of the top and still find that last step quietly removed from under her.

Let me start where I always start. With the numbers.

Out of 276 parliamentary seats, women hold only 41, a mere 14.9%, and that is the highest figure in our history. In our local assemblies, women's representation sits at around 4.1%. The Inter-Parliamentary Union ranks Ghana 147th out of 193 countries for women's representation in parliament, behind our neighbours Rwanda, Senegal and Namibia. I wrote in our very first issue that if that does not sting, nothing will. It still should. But notice what every one of these numbers measures. Entry. Presence. Being counted. Not one of them measures a woman in command.

This is the architecture we have built, and it is a half-built staircase. This very week, a new project launched to prepare a fresh generation of women to contest the 2027 District Assembly elections, and the Affirmative Action Act now requires at least 30% representation of women in public decision-making by 2026, rising in stages to 50% by 2034. These are real victories, won over more than a decade of hard advocacy, and I will not diminish them. But look at the shape of all of it. Every rung is about getting women into the chamber, into the appointment, into the quota. The staircase climbs beautifully and then stops three floors short of the roof, and we have built it with such good intentions that we have not noticed it has no top.

Here is where patriarchy and the empowerment project meet, in a quiet handshake that neither side likes to admit.

The empowerment project, for sound reasons, has fought on the ground of numbers: seats, percentages, quotas. But a movement that measures success in representation can, without meaning to, teach a country that the goal is representation; that a woman's political purpose is to be present, to move the percentage, to fill the seat. Patriarchy, meanwhile, does not need to fight the quota at all. It can hand over every seat and still keep the summit, because it works not by barring the door but by furnishing the imagination. It supplies the picture of what a leader looks like and how a political leader behaves. The serious contender, in that picture, tours the country early and loudly, courts the delegates from the day after the last victory, runs in everything but name. That template was built over thirty years around how men pursue power. It rewards the deepest pocket, in a system where women hold fewer resources, and it punishes the woman who steps forward with a politics of insult that researchers find is far more vicious towards women than men. A man who contests gets attacked on his record, his competence, his alliances. A woman who contests gets that plus a second layer aimed at her as a woman: her appearance, her marital status, her sexual reputation, whether she is a "proper" wife or mother, and insinuations that she slept her way up. The insult attaches to her gender, not just her politics. That second layer is the part men do not face, and it is what makes the same act of "stepping forward" cost a woman more than it costs a man.

So, the two forces shake hands. Empowerment says, get her into the room. Patriarchy says, fine, the room is hers; the head of the table is still mine. And the woman who reaches the second-highest office, but does not perform the loud, relentless, well-funded audition the template demands, is not consciously ruled out by anyone. She is simply, slowly, no longer pictured at the top. The image fades, and no one decided anything. The fading is patriarchy's most effective form.

Now let me show you why that fading is a lie, because our own history exposes it.

Consider the office of Vice President under the Fourth Republic, and where it has carried the men who held it. John Atta Mills served as Vice President, lost his first bid for the top, and returned to win the presidency in 2008. John Dramani Mahama served as Vice President, rose to the presidency in 2012, and sits in the Jubilee House again today. Mahamudu Bawumia served his full term as Vice President and became his party's presidential candidate in 2024. Aliu Mahama reached for the flagbearership too but did not make it. The pattern could not be clearer. In Ghana, the vice presidency has not been a quiet retirement. It has been a launchpad, the single most reliable address from which a person rises to lead this nation.

The office has done this for one man after another. The runway is the same length as it has always been. The only thing never yet tried is letting a woman take off from it.

If you look closely at the field assembling for that runway today, and at who is being pictured on it, you will see it. In the Global InfoAnalytics delegate poll of April 2026, the survey that matters most because delegates, not the public, will choose the flagbearer, the party's National Chairman, Johnson Asiedu Nketia, led on 29%, with Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson on 19%, Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu on 11%, and Chief of Staff Julius Debrah level with the Vice President on 8%. In the wider all-voters model, Forson has surged to 25% and Asiedu Nketia to 20%, while Professor Opoku-Agyemang, who a year earlier led that same field at 24%, has slipped to 11%.

I will not pretend that fall has only one cause. The pollsters themselves link part of her decline to a period of ill health, and that is fair to state plainly. A column that demands honesty from others must practise it. But hold the whole picture together, gentle reader, and a pattern still shows through the caveat. Three men now sit ahead of a sitting Vice President in her own party's reckoning, two of them running hard in the familiar way, and the woman who once topped the very same poll is now spoken of, when she is spoken of at all, in the past tense. Illness explains a dip. It does not explain how quickly a front-runner becomes an afterthought, or how comfortably the conversation has rearranged itself around the men who look the part.

We sometimes tell ourselves Ghana is simply not ready, as if readiness were weather we must wait out. The continent says otherwise. Liberia elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in 2006, Africa's first elected woman president, and she served two full terms and won a Nobel Peace Prize. Namibia's Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah became head of state in 2025 and built a cabinet in which women hold most seats. It can be done and done now. But here is the detail we must sit with. Several of Africa's women leaders, including Tanzania's Samia Suluhu Hassan and Malawi's Joyce Banda, did not arrive at the top through an electoral mandate at all. They stepped up through constitutional succession when a sitting president died. The most common route to a woman leading an African nation has been an accident, a death or a crisis, rather than a party looking at a capable woman and choosing her.

Read that warning plainly. A country can end up with a woman at its head and never once have done the work of wanting her there. Ghana should want better than to wait for a funeral.

And let me be clear about what this is not, because precision matters. This is not a campaign for any single woman. Men have reached the presidency from the vice presidency on merit, and many men are working hard to widen the very picture I am describing. A fair reader will also say that no office is owed to anyone, and that is true. Whether the woman who currently holds our second office chooses to climb is a matter for her conscience and her party's decision, not mine. The argument here is not that she must rise. It is that the rest of us must be able to imagine that she could, with the same ease we have always imagined it for the men who sat exactly where she sits.

Because a country that cannot picture a woman as president will not produce one, no matter how many seats it fills along the way. The imagination comes first. The vote follows the picture. This is why the work is internal before it is political. It asks the party elder, weighing successors, to file a woman's name in the same drawer as the men's, not in a separate drawer marked historic but unlikely. It asks the delegate to notice when electability is only familiarity wearing a serious face. It asks the empowerment movement to lift its own gaze past the quota and say out loud that the goal was never only the room; it was always, eventually, the roof. And it asks every one of us who flinched at that opening image to ask why we flinched, and to sit honestly with the answer.