NPP's running mate in the 2024 election, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, says one hard truth has become clear to him after months of political reflection: the NPP under the Nana Akufo-Addo government simply did not listen enough.

The former Education and Energy Minister believes that failure cost them the trust of the people, and the consequences were severe.

“One thing I’ve concluded in the last 10 months is that there was a broken trust between citizens to government. The trust that was broken hurt so much so that we saw the results so broken,” he said on Joy News’ PM Express on Tuesday.

Asked by host Evans Mensah what caused that rupture, Dr Opoku Prempeh was blunt.

“We didn’t listen enough, we assumed a lot of things we shouldn’t have assumed,” he admitted.

He added that even their sense of purpose as a government came under strain.

He argued that the global environment made everything harder, saying the world had been shaken on multiple fronts.

“We had gone through the worst global economic climate, medically and economically or health-wise,” he said.

According to him, governments everywhere were swept up in a storm. He said many were overturned, with only autocratic regimes surviving the shocks.

He stressed how dramatically the global economy had shifted and pointed to staggering changes in basic costs.

“A container from China that cost $1200 logistic-wise had risen to $14,000. People’s lifetime savings have been wiped out,” he said.

He added that the human toll was just as devastating.

“People had died in their droves that had never been seen before, without a military crisis or World War. So a lot of things that happened.”

Through it all, Dr Prempeh maintained that despite the difficult global context, their biggest failure was not hearing the public early enough. And in his view, that failure paved the way for everything that followed.