Their first face-off came in the 2008 presidential election when each was still running mate to their respective presidential candidate. Sixteen years later, Mahamudu Bawumia, candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), and John Dramani Mahama, standard-bearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), are once again facing off, this time for the supreme magistracy.

To win on Saturday, December 7, 66-year-old John Dramani Mahama, former head of state (2012-2017), leader of the main opposition party and polling favorite according to surveys by Fitch Solutions, the Economist Intelligence Unit and Ghana's Global Info Analytics Institute, is counting on his experience. A member of parliament since 1996, "he bases the credibility of his program on the successes of his record as president," said Kobby Mensah, a political scientist at the Ghana Business School. His tenure at the head of Ghana was marked by investments in road, port and energy infrastructure, as well as in education.

In contrast, the ruling party's vice president and candidate, Mahamudu Bawumia, 61, "seems to be doing his utmost to differentiate himself from the current Nana Akufo-Addo administration, for which he served for eight years," continued Mensah. This stance led him to campaign against measures introduced by the government he served, such as the E-levy, a tax on electronic transactions that sparked protests before its adoption in 2022.

This move is explained by the poor economic situation in which Ghana finds itself at the end of Nana Akufo-Addo's presidency: The country has been defaulting on its debt for two years, inflation is still very high, after an all-time peak of over 54% in December 2022, and the cedi, the local currency, is struggling to stabilize after its fall.

For this election, Bawumia has chosen to focus on the digitization of Ghana, which he describes as "the fourth industrial revolution." Although the process has already been underway for the past eight years, the NPP candidate intends in particular to make the country's entire public administration digitally accessible, and gradually end cash transactions.

The stated aim is to increase transparency and efficiency and to combat rising unemployment, which will affect more than 14% of Ghanaians by the end of 2023. Faced with what has become the main concern of his fellow citizens, according to the latest Afrobarometer report, the vice president promises, for example, the creation, in four years, of "at least one million jobs in the high-tech and digital fields."

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