Dr. Ekua Amoakoh says polling agents were left exposed in 2024, and the party’s new executives must close that gap before the next national vote.
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) is being told by one of its own communicators that it cannot go into the 2028 general elections with the same security arrangements that failed it in 2024.
Dr. Ekua Amoakoh, spokesperson for NPP flagbearer Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, said in an interview reported by The Ghana Report that the party's recently concluded national executive elections show delegates have taken the lessons of the last polls seriously.
What she says went wrong in 2024
Dr. Amoakoh said she worked in the NPP's election war room during the December 2024 vote, where reports of trouble at polling stations and collation centres came in as results were being gathered.
She cited an incident in the Upper East Region in which, she said, polling agents were held at gunpoint and pressured to confirm particular results. She did not name the individuals involved.
According to her, party officials found it difficult to protect their own agents once disturbances started, and that left those agents exposed at a critical stage of the process.
The policing question
Ahead of the 2024 elections, Dr. Amoakoh said the two biggest parties agreed that election security would be left to the Ghana Police Service rather than to party-aligned security groups, a practice that has drawn criticism in past Ghanaian elections.
Her complaint is not with that decision but with the numbers on the ground. She described one collation centre where roughly 100 people had gathered but only about 10 police officers were present, and she said those officers were unarmed.
For her, that mismatch is the core of the problem: an agreement to depend on the police only works if enough officers are actually deployed to each location.
Why the internal elections matter
The NPP has been rebuilding its structures since losing power to the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the 2024 general elections. National executive elections are part of that reorganisation, and the new officers will be the ones who plan the party's ground operations for 2028.
Dr. Amoakoh argued that the choices delegates made in those internal polls signal an awareness within the party that security planning has to be tightened well before the next national vote.
She also pushed back at the governing NDC, saying it was paying too much attention to the NPP's internal affairs and should focus on governing instead.
What to watch
No specific security plan, budget or timeline was announced. For Ghanaians following politics from the United States and elsewhere, the practical test will be whether the NPP's new national executives translate this talk into concrete arrangements, and whether the parties and the Ghana Police Service revisit how many officers are posted to collation centres in 2028.
