Banking sector clean-up, galamsey fight took some votes from us - Government

The government of Ghana has refuted suggestions that the results declared in their favour for both the presidential and parliamentary elections were an indication of failure considering their performance in 2016.

Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah addressing the press on Thursday stated that the two elections are different especially considering the number of persons who registered to vote in the two different elections.

He says the number of persons who voted in the 2016 elections was not the same as 2020 hence the performance of the president is good.

According to him, there were strong groups of persons affected by some though decisions the government had to take who threatened to vote them out.

He said going into the election, there were strong organized groups of persons announcing boldly they were going to campaign against the government.

These groups he revealed include illegal miners, persons, and customers affected by the banking sector clean-up particularly those in the assets management sector who had planned to push the election into a run-off so that the government would be forced to pay them 100 percent of their investments.

He said persons had compelled the government to pay them all their deposits but the government had a choice to break the bank and pay them or maintain fiscal responsibility.

The government he indicated chose the latter and this affected them in the elections.

"So you can check the numbers. The banks alone were about 4.6 million customers, check the various categories. So if you have such a strong cohort saying that if you don’t break the bank for us now, we will vote against you, you can begin to look at its potential impact on margins. I will give you another example of a cohort; those who were involved in activities the government was not responsible for and yet, by force government must pay them now, and if the government didn’t they would vote against the government. You can check those numbers. So, ten million people voting in 2016), with 900,000 margins, 13,000,000 million voting (in 2020, a 500,000 margin, especially at a time when the government has had to take some tough decisions in the interest of the republic and persons affected by it have warned to literally punish government; so we consider this to be a very good result at the end of the day because we did not have to succumb to some of these threats because we wanted to win power.”