On Saturday, October 3, more than 7,000 delegates filled the Baba Yara Sports Stadium in Kumasi and chose nine national officers from 47 aspirants.
I congratulate our new National Chairman, John Boadu, our re-elected General Secretary, Justin Kodua Frimpong, and every officer who won. To those who did not win, the party still needs your support.
Now the cheering is over, and the real work starts.
I have spent most of my working life inside organisations that needed fixing.
I've sat on the finance team of a UK local council, worked on donor-funded projects at our own Ministry of Public Sector Reform, run operations at a savings and loans company, and consulted for many institutions.
Today, I advise businesses and actively run businesses myself.
When I look at our party, I can't help seeing it the way I see a client.
The NPP is not a company. But it has members to serve, money to manage, a brand to protect, and a market it has to win back.
And right now, the numbers tell us that the market has walked away from us.
Let's start with the hard numbers.
In 2020, our candidate polled 6,730,413 votes.
In 2024, the Electoral Commission's updated figures gave us 4,877,611.
That is roughly 1.85 million votes lost in four years.
Turnout fell from 79 per cent to about 64 per cent.
We lost around 50 parliamentary seats and, with them, our majority.
Even in the Ashanti Region, our heartland and stronghold, our presidential vote dropped from about 1.7 million to 1.3 million.
Votes as sales
Think of votes as sales. No business owner would see sales fall by more than a quarter and blame the weather.
You would want to know exactly where the customers went and why.
To our credit, the party did ask.
The committee chaired by Professor Mike Oquaye reported in April 2025.
According to Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, it named four causes: the economy, lapses in party corporate governance, internal conflicts, and a feeling among many members that they were shut out of decisions.
Look closely at that list. Only the first is about government policy.
The other three are management problems. In any SME diagnostic I have done, that pattern has a name – weak governance.
The good news is that governance can be fixed, and much faster than an economy.
Give every constituency a scorecard
In business, nobody gets paid for having good intentions.
Every project must have a results framework: targets and indicators, reviewed every quarter.
If a project falls behind, you know within weeks, not at the end.
Our party can do the same across all 276 constituencies.
Each executive should carry a one-page digital scorecard: members recruited and verified, polling station teams active, dues collected, and community meetings held.
The same must apply at the regional level.
The national secretariat should review it every quarter and share the results with the constituencies and regions.
Some will say the process is too much paperwork for volunteers. I disagree.
In January, this same party moved 211,849 delegates through 333 voting centres in a single day without serious trouble.
An organisation that can do that can certainly fill in a digital scorecard.
I would add one more thing.
The Oquaye report has stayed confidential.
The new executives should at least share a summary with the grass roots.
Those tasked with solving a problem deserve to understand its nature.
Digitalisation
The party that digitalised Ghana must digitalise itself.
Few politicians in Africa have argued for digitalisation as hard as our flag bearer, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia.
The Ghana Card, mobile money interoperability and the digital address system: we told Ghanaians technology would change how the country works.
We were right, and we will be right again if we apply it to our great party.
Look at the figures. By December 2025, Ghana had 26.7 million active mobile money accounts.
The Bank of Ghana's provisional estimate puts the value of mobile money transactions in 2025 at about GH¢4.5 trillion.
DataReportal counted 24.3 million internet users in January 2025.
Our members are already living digital lives.
Yet in too many constituencies, the party register is still an exercise book in someone's drawer. It can be done.
In 2005, at the local council where I worked in the UK, I was part of the master data team tasked with taking the council fully digital.
I saw how our team worked tirelessly to move from manual operations to digital operations.
The NPP needs a single verified membership register tied to the Ghana Card, dues paid by mobile money, and a dashboard showing headquarters what is happening at every polling station each week.
When a member stops paying or stops showing up, someone should notice and call.
That is how reputable businesses keep customers.
It is how we keep members.
Keep clean books
I learnt one lesson quickly when I started my business: trust is built in the ledger.
Customers won't forgive slow service, and they won't forgive missing money.
A party is no different.
Our structures often only become active during election season and fall silent once funding is depleted.
That is not sustainable. Do the arithmetic.
If just 500,000 members paid GH¢10 a month by mobile money, the party would collect GH¢60 million a year.
That money could fund constituency offices, research and training, and reduce our dependence on a few big donors whose generosity always comes with expectations.
But members will only pay if they trust where the money goes.
Please publish audited accounts every year and present them to members, not only to the National Council.
A party that cannot account for its funds will find it hard to convince Ghanaians it can manage the national purse.
Open the doors
The fourth finding of the Oquaye committee should worry us most: members felt excluded.
People who feel shut out do not campaign.
Many of them simply stayed home in December 2024.
Every business I have advised that turned itself around did one thing well.
It put capable people in the right roles and let them speak.
Loyalty matters in politics, but loyalty without competence is a liability.
Ghana is full of accountants, engineers, IT specialists, lawyers, traders and young founders who share our values but have never felt welcome at a party office.
The new executive should go and find them.
Establish policy and technical committees with meaningful tasks, and ensure that the youth and women's wings are included in decision-making, not just at rallies.
26 Months
The December 2028 election is about 26 months away.
In business terms, that is two budget cycles.
It is enough time to rebuild a party if the work starts now.
It is far too little if we spend the first year celebrating and the second year quarrelling.
Chairman John Boadu said in Kumasi that there must be no winners or losers, only one united NPP.
I agree.
Unity, though, is not a slogan.
It comes from systems that make people feel counted, heard and accountable.
Ghanaians will judge us less by our songs than by how well we run our house.
A party that manages itself well earns the right to manage the nation.
The writer is a business consultant, strategic adviser and CEO of KFF Consult & Investment Limited, Accra.
He contested the NPP parliamentary primary in Ahafo Ano North in 2023.
