Ghana’s 2016 elections are nearly at a climax with the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) winning an emphatic mandate to lead the country in the executive and legislature according to Pulse.com.gh independent projections ending the eight year rule of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
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How Ghana's social media savvy millennials became kingmakers
Fifty four percent of Ghana's population is under 24. What issues were most important to this section of the population who become kingmakers in this bitterly fought election?
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One section of the voting demographic, that the parties were looking to capture was millennials (born between 1982 and 2004). Ghana is a very young country. Fifty four percent of the population is under 24 and by the next elections in 2020, 70 percent of Ghana’s people will be under 35 years.
As such, young people played perhaps the most important role in this year’s polls. But how did Ghana’s social media savvy millennials become kingmakers?
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Higher education
Millennials in Ghana are highly educated with many having a minimum of a secondary school education. As such, they appreciate the problems better and are able to analyse (without being patronising) the problems better than their parents. The NPP has traditionally presented itself as the party of intellectuals while the NDC exuded a more ‘common man’ feeling. It is no doubt the vice-presidential candidate of the NPP, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, (a renowned economist) was such a popular personality among the youth.
They walked their tweets
Unlike their peers in the United Kingdom and United States, Ghana’s millennials didn’t just sit on Twitter to rant at what they described as a bad government, they turned out in their numbers to vote. Before the elections, there were concerns of apathy among young voters but that was not the case in this election. Unlike in the past when people queued for hours under the blazing sun, people voted within three minutes of turning up at the polling station. This relative ease of voting which spread on social media encouraged many young people to show up and vote.
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Ethnicity didn’t matter
Unlike their parents’ generation, ethnic, regional or religious affiliation does not hold strong importance to young people and did not affect who they voted for. Highly educated, boarding schooled and urbanised, stereotypes of the old were absent in this election.
They saw their parents struggle
The outgoing government oversaw an epic failure in economic management whose harsh end results were not absent in many homes. Ghana had moved from one of the world’s fastest growing economies to dismal credit ratings that saw the country head to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for salvation. Millennials saw their parents either get laid off, struggle to keep businesses that were reeling from dumsor (electricity crisis) alive, struggle to pay electricity bills and the surge of school fees and major foreign currencies against the cedi.
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A bleak future
Ultimately, it was the gloomy picture of the future that determined where young thumbs turned to in the voting booths. Millennials saw their older siblings, seniors at school or themselves graduate without jobs after mandatory national service. This was due in part to the freeze on employment into the public sector (as part of IMF conditionality) and the struggle of the private sector to absorb graduates. Those who got in saw salaries delayed for up to two years for some people.
Youth unemployment was a major campaign message that the opposition used against the government which invariably struck a chord with young voters. Although the government instituted some modules to employ hundreds of youth, these jobs were low skilled (including beach cleaning, and traffic direction), unsustainable (lasted only a couple of months), had low pay and never far from the next corruption scandal. It was also not easy to get in as those with governing party connections were the most likely to getting in; leaving the NDC in effect, preaching to the choir. Gentrification and its accompanying rent hikes in cities and income inequality also contributed to the choice of young people.
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