In Ghanaian politics, silence is rarely empty. It is usually the most carefully constructed statement a politician can make. And nobody in the current National Democratic Congress (NDC) firmament has deployed silence more effectively than Vice President Professor Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang.
She has not said she wants the presidency. She has not said she does not want it. She has watched Haruna Iddrisu nominate her publicly, repeatedly, and she has neither embraced the endorsement nor distanced herself from it.
She sits at the centre of a succession conversation she did not start, surrounded by men with deep political histories and unfinished ambitions of their own, and she has said, in effect, nothing.
In another politician, that silence might read as disinterest. In Naana, it reads as strategy. Yet, silence can also be genuine uncertainty. At 74, a presidential run is an exhausting, multi‑year ordeal. She may be weighing the historic opportunity against the physical and emotional toll of another campaign. And that distinction matters enormously for where Ghana’s political story goes next.
The office and its occupants
Look carefully at who surrounds the Vice President, and you begin to understand why the question of her intentions is so difficult to answer, and so impossible to ignore.
Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, the former NDC national chairman who was unseated by Johnson Asiedu Nketiah, now serves as Policy Adviser for Political Affairs at the Office of the Vice President.
His presence there is not merely administrative. Mr Ofosu-Ampofo carries decades of party architecture; delegate relationships, regional networks, and institutional memory accumulated across years at the top of NDC’s organisational structure.
A man with that kind of capital does not attach himself to a vice president out of sentiment. He is there because he sees something worth being close to.
Then there is Alex Segbefia, the Chief of Staff at the Office of the Vice President. Mr Segbefia is not a political newcomer. He is a man who has carried his own presidential ambitions for years, who understands the machinery of power from the inside, and who now runs the day-to-day operations of the Vice President’s office.
He is, in every meaningful sense, the architect of how she is presented, who she meets, and what her political footprint looks like.
Two men. Both with histories. Both with ambitions. Both now operating from within her orbit. The question that political watchers are quietly asking cannot yet be answered: are they building her, or are they building through her?
It may well be both. And Naana, if she is as politically astute as her deliberate ambiguity suggests, knows this and has chosen to let it run.
A Vice President who benefits from the groundwork of experienced political operators while maintaining plausible distance from any declared ambition is in a remarkably powerful position. She accumulates without committing. She is positioned without being exposed.
What she brings
Strip away the internal manoeuvring and Naana’s political case is genuinely compelling. She ran on a winning presidential ticket. She has national name recognition across every region.
She carries the historic weight of potentially becoming Ghana’s first female president, a fact that energises a specific and growing constituency that no male candidate can replicate.
Yet history warns. The only time a woman has contested the NDC’s presidential primaries, she lost. In 2011, the late Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings, a figure of immense name recognition, revolutionary credentials, and the backing of former President Jerry John Rawlings, challenged the incumbent Prof. Mills. She secured barely three per cent of delegates’ votes. That humbling defeat remains seared into party memory.
Naana’s challenge is also different from Dr Bawumia’s. She has not yet demonstrated the capacity to lead a campaign independently, to take hits, to fight back, to sustain the grinding, unglamorous work of building a presidential coalition from scratch.
Being on a winning ticket is a valuable experience. It is not the same as leading one.
The next two years in the Vice Presidency are, in effect, her audition. How she handles difficult assignments, how she navigates internal party tensions, how she performs in the public spaces where presidential timber is judged, all of this will answer the question her silence currently leaves open.
The shadow in the corner
There is one more figure in this picture. He holds no official title in the Vice President’s office. Yet his proximity to Prof. Opoku Agyemang is one of the most consequential and least examined facts in Ghana’s current political landscape.
Kwesi Pratt Jnr, veteran journalist, socialist activist, and one of Ghana’s most enduring public intellectuals, is close to the Vice President in ways that go beyond the personal.
His daughter, Ama Pratt, serves as Press Secretary to the Vice President. The Press Secretary controls daily narrative, manages media access, and sits at the intersection of everything the VP says and how the country hears it. That is not proximity. That is architecture.
To understand why this matters, one must recall what Kwesi Pratt said at the 12th John Evans Atta Mills Commemorative Lecture, organised by the J.E.A. Mills Memorial Heritage at the University of Ghana, Legon. Before an academic audience and party faithful gathered to honour the late president, he stated plainly how instrumental he had been in building the political path that delivered Prof. Mills to the presidency.
It was a statement of record from a man who wanted history to know what he had contributed.
Mr Pratt told a story that should never be forgotten. At a critical moment during the campaign, Prof. Mills called him and said, in Fante, that all his money had finished. Not “we are low on funds.” Finished.
Mr Pratt said he immediately called some of Prof. Mills’ close friends, including Ato Ahoi, and together they mobilised funds to keep the campaign running. That is not the work of a mere commentator or a sympathiser.
The Prof. Mills parallel is worth sitting with. Like Naana, Prof. Mills was initially perceived as scholarly, principled, and non-combative, a figure who needed architects around him to translate personal integrity into presidential momentum.
Kwesi Pratt was one of those architects. He knows what that work looks like. His current closeness to a Vice President who shares several of Prof. Mills’ most compelling qualities is not, one suspects, coincidental.
He has no title. He attends no official meetings. But in the quiet architecture of what may become a presidential campaign, Kwesi Pratt’s shadow falls long across the Vice President’s office.
The question the NDC cannot answer
The NDC’s succession conversation, as I noted in an article last week, has already begun, even if the party has not announced it. But within that conversation, Naana occupies a unique and structurally awkward position.
She is simultaneously the most discussed potential candidate and the one who has said the least. She is the person Haruna keeps naming while everyone else keeps positioning. She is the VP whose office has become, quietly, one of the most politically loaded addresses in Accra.
And yet nobody, not her allies, not her advisors, not the party elders watching carefully, not even the man who once built a president and may believe he is doing it again, can tell you with confidence what she actually wants.
That ambiguity is either her greatest asset or the thing that will eventually cost her. In politics, the window for deliberate silence eventually closes. At some point the question stops being “will she run” and becomes “why hasn’t she said?” The transition between those two questions is where political momentum is either built or lost.
For now, Prof. Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang remains the most powerful unanswered question in Ghanaian politics. The country is watching. Her party is watching. And the men in her office, titled and untitled alike, are watching most carefully of all.
Kester Aburam Korankye is the Presidential Affairs Correspondent of the Daily Graphic.
