Ghanaians will go to the polls on December 7 to elect a new president as incumbent Nana Akufo-Addo completes his constitutional two-term limit, having been in office since 2017. With Akufo-Addo ineligible for re-election, the contest is set to bring new leadership to Ghana.
According to Ghana’s Electoral Commission, there are 27 registered political parties. However, the political landscape is largely dominated by two major parties: the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), whose members hold the majority in parliament.
Former president John Mahama, the NDC candidate, will be aiming to secure a fresh term after losing his re-election bid in 2016 to Akufo-Addo. Meanwhile, the incumbent vice president, Mahamudu Bawumia, is representing the NPP as its presidential candidate.
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Mahamudu Bawumia
Bamuwia, 61, is the current vice president of Ghana and the presidential nominee for the NPP. He is an astute economist having a wealth of experience working for international organisations.
He graduated with First Class Honours in Economics from Buckingham University in 1987 and obtained the Chartered Institute of Bankers Diploma (ACIB) in the United Kingdom.
He also holds a master’s degree in Economics from Lincoln College, Oxford and obtained a PhD in Economics at the Simon Fraser University Vancouver British Columbia, Canada in 1995. His areas of specialisation include Macroeconomic, International Economics, Development and Monetary Policy.
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From 1988 to 1990, Bawumia worked as a lecturer in Monetary Economics, and International Finance at the Emile Woolf College of Accountancy in London. He also served as an economist at the Research Department at the IMF
Between 1996 and 2000, Bawumia served as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University in Waco USA, where he also received the Young Researcher Award in 1998. He was listed in “Who is Who Among America’s Teachers’ in 1999. He has also published two books on monetary policy and economic development.
Bawumia returned to Ghana in 2000 to work as an economist at the Bank of Ghana where he rose from Senior Economist to Head of Department, and subsequently as Special Assistant to the Governor of the Bank.
He was appointed Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Ghana by former President John Kufuor in 2006. He also served as an advisor to the Central Bank of Sierra Leone on the redesigning of the organisational structure of the bank and its monetary policy framework.
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Bawumia served as a consultant to the Economic Commission of Africa between February and March 2009. Between April and October 2009, he was a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia.
During the 2008 elections, Bawumia was running mate to the New Patriotic Party candidate Nana Akufo-Addo. In 2012 and 2016 he was re-nominated as the Vice-Presidential Candidate for Akufo-Addo.
In 2023, Bawumia filed his nomination to contest in the NPP Presidential primaries and won the party votes with 60 per cent to become the flag bearer of the NPP for the presidential election.
Bamuwia is a Muslim, if he wins, he will be the first Muslim president of Ghana. He’s married to Samira Bawumia and together they have four children.
John Dramani Mahama
Mahama, 65, is a former vice president and one-time single-term president.
He has a Bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Ghana and also a postgraduate degree in Social psychology from the Institute of Social Science in Moscow.
Mahama once worked as a teacher before, working as the Information, Culture and Research Officer at the Embassy of Japan in Accra between 1991 and 1995.
His first attempt at politics was in 1996 when he was elected to the Parliament of Ghana. He served a full eight-year term and an additional third term, which ended in 2004.
In 199Fromtill 2009 Mahama served and worked in communications holding various positions such as Deputy Minister of Communications, Minority Parliamentary Spokesman for Communications and Chairman of the National Communications Authority.
Mahama was sworn into office as the Vice-President of the Republic of Ghana to former president John Evan Atta Mills. Following Atta Mills’s death in 2012 and in line with the constitution of Ghana, he was immediately sworn in as the President of Ghana and therefore became Ghana’s first president to have served at all levels of political office (Ghanaian and Pan-African MP, Deputy Minister, Minister, vice-president and President).
In 2012, he contested for the full term as president and won the elections beating current president Akufo-Addo. In 2014, he was elected to preside over ECOWAS. In 2016 he sought a re-election but lost the election.
Mahama is married to Lordina and they have five children.
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