At the heart of both Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia’s and Alexander Afenyo-Markin’s speeches at the 2025 NPP National Delegates Conference lies the peculiar insistence that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a broad-based national party. In any other context, such a claim might pass without scrutiny. But in Ghana’s highly perceptive political landscape, this assertion triggers more alarm than reassurance.
Why are two high-profile non-Akan members of the NPP suddenly working overtime to convince the public that their party is inclusive? Why are they repeating a message that has little resonance with many Ghanaians?
The answer is simple. They are trying to manage an open secret. The NPP, despite all rhetorical attempts to brand itself otherwise, has functioned and continues to operate as an ethnic-based Akan political party dominated in structure, support base, and strategic decision-making by Akan elites, particularly from the Ashanti and Eastern regions.
This article revisits and expands arguments I first laid out in a 2015 GhanaWeb publication titled “NPP is an ethnic-based Akan party with an image problem.” Ten years later, that image problem has not only persisted. It has hardened into a structural reality.
The legacy of Akan dominance
From the origins of the so-called Danquah-Busia-Dombo tradition, the NPP has drawn its ideological and political life from Akan strongholds. The Ashanti Region and parts of the Eastern Region have historically accounted for the party’s core electoral victories, funding networks, and elite leadership. This alone does not make a party tribal or ethnic. However, what makes the NPP’s case distinct is its inability, and in some cases, unwillingness, to share real power beyond this ethnic core.
Even during moments of national defeat or transition, the party reflexively turns inward to its Akan leadership. When Northerners or non-Akans are elevated, they are rarely given independent power. They are deployed to neutralise ethnic backlash or to appeal to a broader electorate, never to redefine the NPP’s internal structure.
This is what makes Bawumia and Afenyo-Markin’s recent speeches so revealing. Their loud insistence that “We are not Akyem, Ashanti, Fante, Mamprusi, Ga or Ewe. We are NPP,” as Afenyo-Markin put it, belies the very internal reality that has marginalised their own roles.
Bawumia and Afenyo-Markin: Symbols, not strategists
Both men are deeply accomplished. Yet within the NPP, their political rise has been instrumentalised. Bawumia, in particular, has been paraded as the face of Northern inclusion in the NPP since his appointment as running mate in 2008. But behind the scenes, key decisions, including those that shaped the 2024 electoral defeat, were crafted by entrenched Akan factions.
In the 2015 article, I cited how Akufo-Addo once openly referred to the NPP as a party for “Yɛn Akanfo,” or “we the Akans.” This was not a gaffe. It was a moment of candour that reflected a shared elite consciousness. Similarly, Yaw Osafo-Maafo’s infamous 2015 comments in Koforidua, where he questioned the logic of allowing non-Akan regions to control Ghana’s natural resources, exposed the worldview of many within the NPP’s top brass: Akan ownership of the state.
That worldview persists. The internal wrangling between the Akyem and Asante factions of the NPP is not about national interest. It is an elite tribal/ethnic competition for supremacy within a party that has failed to integrate Ghana’s full ethnic mosaic.
Ethnic signalling in word and deed
The need for Bawumia and Afenyo-Markin to overemphasise “broad-based” identity stems from rising public scepticism. After nearly two decades of rule under the NPP, many Ghanaians across Volta, Northern, and Zongo communities have little to show. Political appointments have disproportionately favoured Akan regions. Intra-party leadership contests have consistently sidelined non-Akans for the highest roles, except when tokenism demands otherwise.
During the 2024 elections, it was telling that some party faithful in Ashanti expressed unease with Bawumia’s candidacy, not based on competence, but on ethnicity. Social media was rife with comments such as: “We cannot hand over the party to a Northerner” or “This is an Akan party; we decide.” These were not fringe sentiments. They echoed deep anxieties within the party’s base.
Such sentiments expose the limits of the NPP’s “we are all one” rhetoric. The party’s grassroots do not believe it. Its inner circle doesn’t practice it. And its critics within and outside Ghana have long recognised the contradiction.
The NDC as a case study in inclusive nationalism
In contrast, the NDC has been a mosaic of Ghana’s ethnic and religious diversity. From Rawlings’ Ewe-Catholic identity to Atta Mills’ Fante-Protestant roots, to Mahama’s Northern-Christian background, the NDC has demonstrated a willingness to rotate leadership across regions and cultures.
Party strongholds span Greater Accra, Volta, Northern, Upper East, Upper West, and parts of the Central Region. While no party is immune to ethnic voting patterns, the NDC has never institutionalised tribal/ethnic hierarchy the way the NPP has. Appointments, running mates, and ministerial portfolios are distributed with a more balanced eye, not as appeasement, but as policy.
The difference is ideological as much as structural. The NDC believes in nation-building through representation, while the NPP continues to pursue governance through Akan consolidation.
The Real Agenda: Akanising the State?
If we are to judge by appointments, resource allocation, language, and internal competition, the NPP’s long-term vision appears disturbingly clear: to centralise political and economic power around Akan interests. Ghana risks becoming a republic where power alternates within one cultural group, while others are offered the consolation prize of “errand boys” and spokespersons.
That vision is dangerous. It stokes resentment. It undermines democracy. And it alienates millions of Ghanaians whose only crime is to belong to the “wrong” ethnic background.
The takeaway
When Bawumia and Afenyo-Markin loudly declare that the NPP is broad-based, they are not proclaiming a fact. They are trying to cover a wound. They are pleading for belief in a myth that has already collapsed under the weight of its contradictions.
Ghanaians are not blind. The NPP may have men, but the men with power are Akan. The rest are pawns in a national game of illusion.
If the NPP is serious about unity, it must dismantle its Akan stronghold, not just in word, but in deed. Until then, its proclamations of inclusion will remain hollow.
And as I warned in 2015, the image problem is not just cosmetic. It is existential!
*Dr Moses Deyegbe Kuvoame is an Associate Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway. He is also a member of the NDC Nordic Chapter’s Policy Team.
