Former National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr Paul Afoko, has emerged from years of self-imposed exile, delivering a brutal assessment of the party’s current structural health.
Addressing a closed-door consultative meeting with the NPP Regional Executive Committee for Greater Accra on Thursday, 21 May 2026, the former chairman warned that internal complacency had severely weakened the party’s electoral machinery.
Mr Afoko’s engagement forms part of a strategic, nationwide tour aimed at consulting grassroots leaders and regional powerbrokers ahead of his anticipated full-scale return to frontline party politics.
Confronting the regional leadership with remarkable candour, Mr Afoko stated that the party could no longer afford to live in denial regarding its structural slide.
“You cannot sit back and say, oh, we are OK. We have lost a lot of ground, a lot of ground,” he stated flatly.
Reminding the executives of his institutional legacy, Mr Afoko recalled the formidable and highly organised operational blueprint engineered during his brief, turbulent tenure as National Chairman. He argued that the strategic systems built by his administration laid the indispensable groundwork that ultimately propelled the party into office.
“From the time when I was chairman, when with the team that I was elected with at the time, we were able to put everything in place ready for the general elections,” Mr Afoko recalled.
Reflecting on his controversial suspension from the party’s helm just before the fruits of that hard labour could be harvested, the former chairman drew a biblical parallel to express the heartbreak of being sidelined on the cusp of a historic triumph.
“As I said yesterday somewhere, I saw the promised land, but I didn’t get there, for reasons that we all know. But that did not stop me from being an NPP member and following the party closely, because I love the party,” he revealed.
Opening up about his long absence from public life, Mr Afoko explained that his withdrawal from the media glare was a deeply calculated, painful, yet necessary sacrifice to protect the internal cohesion of the party during its initial years in government.
“All through the years that I have been silent, that was a deliberate decision I had made. Of course, there was pain at the time,” he stressed.
The former chairman recounted how his initial attempt to break his silence and defend the newly elected NPP administration was met with fierce, hostile backlash from the very party he sought to protect.
“The first time I spoke to the media, I just got clapped back… And I said let us stay away [and ] keep quiet. I was asked the question, 100 days have passed. What has the new government achieved? And I said to them, I think you’re asking too much of a new government. I have experienced governments here in Ghana for so many terms, and there is no single government that has come within 100 days and been able to get the whole government formed,” he said.
Defending his historical call for public patience during the administration’s infancy, Mr Afoko reiterated his famous macro-economic analogy regarding the heavy complexities of statecraft and executive governance.
“The ship of state is like a super tanker on the high seas. It cannot just turn around like a sports car. It takes time to turn around, a wide berth. Therefore, I think we should be patient and allow the government time to settle,” Mr Afoko explained.
However, rather than receiving appreciation from internal party actors, Mr Afoko said his defence of the presidency was weaponised against him by detractors, forcing him back into operational isolation.
“Then the comments that followed, Afoko says, ‘Nana Addo has failed’, and that was it. And immediately, I realised, hm, ‘keep quiet, stay away and support as quietly as you can’. And I did,” the former chairman narrated.
Despite being driven underground by internal factionalism, Mr Afoko revealed that he never abandoned his duties as a committed kingmaker, disclosing that he continuously leveraged his personal resources and networks to bankroll and support preferred parliamentary candidates to victory.
“There are people who I supported to get into parliament,” he revealed.
With the party now licking its wounds following recent electoral setbacks, Mr Afoko’s consultative tour of the Greater Accra Region is being closely watched by political analysts.
His ongoing engagements are widely interpreted as a deliberate move to position himself as a unifying, elder statesman capable of reconciling bitter internal factions, enforcing structural discipline, and reclaiming the critical political ground the party has lost over the last decade.
