Ministerial reshuffle does nothing to Bawumia’s electoral performance ahead of polls – UCC lecturer

A political analyst at the University of Cape Coast, Dr. Jonathan Asante Otchere, has stated that the recent reshuffling by President Akufo-Addo in his government has no potential electoral benefits for the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) presidential candidate, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.

According to him, the President missed an opportunity to redeem the image of Vice President Dr. Bawumia.

“If it is a matter of a strategy for electoral victory, I think that it is not going to have any kind of impact.

“Strategy-wise, if you want to appeal to the middle class, this kind of reshuffle should have been situated within the speech that Dr. Bawumia gave. That’s the major change that he intends to make when he gets the opportunity to govern this country.

“…the President could have used this as more of an attempt to gain the credibility that Dr. Bawumia has lost back. The goodwill as far as Ghanaians are concerned back and the level of believability rise,” onuaonline.com quoted him to have said in an interview on TV3 on February 15, 2024.

While Dr. Jonathan Asante Otchere acknowledged that the decision to replace sitting Members of Parliament and ministers who lost in the NPP parliamentary primaries might make sense on the parliamentary side, he was skeptical about its impact on the presidential election.

“If you keep supplying members of your party to occupy all these positions that have become vacant, this particular decision by the President will not in any way affect positively the electoral fortunes of Dr. Bawumia.

“Probably if you look at the parliamentary section, you could see that it is very political because those who have lost out and those who did not contest, they have nothing to lose, so why would they [the government] keep them? I think that one makes sense.

“When you are doing a reshuffle, you need to know the theoretical framework that you are operating with. What framework is the President operating? The most important agenda now is breaking ‘eight,’ so how does this reshuffle fit into the breaking eight agenda, and that, for me, I am of the view that it does not,” he explained.