Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin has acknowledged that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) lost the confidence of Ghana‘s middle class following a series of tough economic measures taken to stabilise the country’s economy.
Speaking on PM Express on JoyNews on October 27, the Effutu MP said the government’s debt restructuring exercise and related austerity policies commonly referred to as “haircuts” alienated a significant portion of the NPP’s traditional support base, particularly professionals and business owners.
“We lost the middle class, our own base, the businessmen, because there was some haircut… pensioners, educated people who ordinarily would vote NPP got disappointed,” he said. “To the extent that a former Chief Justice, appointed by our own administration, was on the streets fighting for her pension, it’s understandable.”
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Afenyo-Markin explained that the decisions were made during a period of global economic turbulence, which forced the government to make painful but necessary choices.
“We were faced with some huge challenges. We tried, but we were not too successful,” he admitted. “In stabilising the economy, certain hard decisions had to be taken.”
Despite the economic fallout, the Effutu MP highlighted several achievements of the NPP, including flagship programmes such as Free SHS and One District, One Factory (1D1F), which he said had transformed lives and expanded opportunities nationwide.
“Ours is to create a platform to build the human resource capacity of the Ghanaian people. We did that successfully,” he noted.
Defending the NPP’s record on social interventions, Afenyo-Markin challenged the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to point to any comparable initiatives it had implemented since 1992.
“Recently in Parliament, I challenged the Majority Leader to name a single social intervention policy the NDC has initiated and implemented successfully since 1992. They have zero,” he said, citing Free SHS, 1D1F, school feeding, health insurance, and the mass transport system as enduring legacies of NPP administrations.
Reflecting on his own upbringing, Afenyo-Markin shared that he almost dropped out of St. Augustine’s College until he received a bursary introduced by Dr Paa Kwesi Nduom.
“But for that bursary, I would have dropped out,” he recalled, stressing that policies like Free SHS continue to provide life-changing opportunities for Ghanaian youth.
He concluded that, while the NPP’s economic reforms cost the party political goodwill, its social and developmental achievements remain undeniable.
“In spite of all these disappointments, we should still let the Ghanaian people know the good things we did,” he said. “We shouldn’t shy away from our success stories.”
