We didn’t listen enough — Napo says broken trust cost NPP power

NPP’s 2024 running mate, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, says months of reflection have led him to one painful truth that the Nana Akufo-Addo-led NPP government did not listen to the public enough.

The former Education and Energy Minister believes this failure eroded public trust, and the political consequences were significant.

“In the last 10 months, I’ve concluded that there was a breakdown of trust between citizens and the government. That broken trust hurt deeply, and the results reflected it,” he said.

When asked what caused this breakdown, Dr. Opoku Prempeh answered, “We didn’t listen enough. We made assumptions we shouldn’t have made”.

He added that even the government’s sense of direction came under pressure, arguing that global challenges made governing even more difficult.

“We had gone through the worst global economic climate, medically and economically or health-wise,” he said.

According to him, governments everywhere were swept up in a storm. He said many were overturned, with only autocratic regimes surviving the shocks.

He added that the human toll was just as devastating.

“People had died in their droves that had never been seen before, without a military crisis or World War. So a lot of things that happened.”

Through it all, Dr Prempeh maintained that despite the difficult global context, their biggest failure was not hearing the public early enough.

And in his view, that failure paved the way for everything that followed.

He stressed how dramatically the global economy had shifted and pointed to staggering changes in basic costs.

“A container from China that cost $1200 logistic-wise had risen to $14,000. People’s lifetime savings have been wiped out,” he said in an interview with Joy News.