Competing for Consent: How Ghana's Major Parties Manage Class Contradictions

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By Sumaila Mohammed

Every four years, Ghana is told that a great choice is on offer. Reset or upgrade. Change or continuity. NDC or NPP. The billboards multiply, the colours change from red-white-black to blue-white-red, and a nation is invited to believe that its future hangs on which of two parties controls the flag-bearer's convoy. What is never put to a vote, because it is never named as a choice at all, is the economic architecture both parties have agreed, since 1983, to leave untouched: an economy built to attract foreign capital, service external debt, and export raw commodities, governed by a state whose room to manoeuvre is set less in Parliament than in the conditionalities attached to the latest IMF facility.

This is not an accident of weak leadership. It is the outcome of forty years of practice at a specific political task: not resolving the contradictions between Ghana's classes, but managing consent to a system that keeps producing them. Every society run on behalf of a narrow class interest needs to secure agreement, or at least non-resistance, from the much larger number of people that interest is extracted from. Ghana's two parties have become extraordinarily skilled at exactly this task, and it is this skill, not any real difference in economic direction, that decides most elections. The quarrel between the NDC and NPP is genuine. It is a quarrel over who gets to sit in the ministries, who gets the contracts, whose loyalists staff the boards of state enterprises, which region's chiefs get courted this cycle. It is not a quarrel over whether Ghana's currency, land, mineral wealth, and labour should continue to be organised primarily around the demands of international capital. On that question, both parties settled long ago. What they compete over is who can better manufacture consent to it, this cycle, from a population whose different classes have good reason not to give it.

A shared inheritance

The NDC likes to remember itself as the party of Rawlings, of probity and accountability, of an elusive revolution that stood against corrupt elites. The NPP likes to remember itself as the party of the Danquah-Busia tradition, of liberal constitutionalism against military rule. Both memories contain some truth and both conveniently omit the same fact: it was the PNDC, Rawlings' own government, that signed Ghana onto structural adjustment in 1983, and it was under NDC and NPP administrations alike, without interruption, that the programme was carried through to completion. State enterprises were privatised under both parties. Trade was liberalised under both. The currency was floated and has been managed as a variable to be defended for investor confidence, not as an instrument of sovereign development policy, under both. Every debt restructuring since the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative of the early 2000s to the 2023 domestic debt exchange has been negotiated inside a framework neither party has seriously proposed to exit.

What alternates in Ghana is not the economic model but the management team, and increasingly, the consent-management team. This is precisely why campaigns have grown louder on personality, competence, and probity, and quieter on structure. If the model itself is not up for argument, the only remaining contest is over who can be trusted to make its costs feel bearable, and who can better perform anger at the last team's failures while inheriting the same terms of trade, the same debt stock, the same IMF programme.

Consent is not agreement, it is management

It is worth being precise about what "consent" means here, because it is not the same as agreement. Nobody surveys Ghanaians on structural adjustment and finds enthusiastic support. What both parties have learned to produce instead is something closer to resignation dressed as choice: a sense, manufactured cycle after cycle, that this is simply how things work, that the alternative party would do no better, and that the way to improve one's situation is to vote for better management of the existing arrangement rather than to question the arrangement itself. This is achieved less through argument than through a set of recurring techniques: targeted material relief timed to election cycles, rhetorical appeals to sacrifice and patience during austerity, the selective use of chieftaincy and regional loyalty to substitute cultural belonging for economic interest, and a media and NGO ecosystem that treats "the economy" as a technical matter for experts rather than a political choice between classes.

Ansa Asamoa's argument in Classes and Tribalism in Ghana is useful here, even outside the ethnic framing he was most concerned with: Ghanaian political language habitually converts class interest into something more comfortable, more marketable, less threatening to the status quo. What he traced into tribal loyalty is the same operation both parties now perform through the vague, flattering, endlessly elastic category of "the middle class," a term that asks nothing of anyone and names no antagonism, and through appeals to national unity and sacrifice that ask a mineworker and a mining concession holder to feel they share a single interest, provided the right party is in office.

The contradictions each party has to manage

Both parties face the same underlying problem: assembling and holding the consent of groups whose material interests genuinely conflict. What differs, election to election, is which contradiction is managed well and which one breaks open.

The contract elite and everyone else. Mining and oil concession holders, import-license beneficiaries, and the contractors and party officials who cycle through government tenders depend on continued access to state gatekeeping. Their consent is easy to secure, because they are the system's beneficiaries. The harder task is securing everyone else's consent to a state that visibly serves this group first, which is why anti-corruption rhetoric is deployed so heavily by whichever party is out of office, and abandoned so quickly by whichever party is in it.

Landlords and tenants. Rising property values protect one group's wealth against currency depreciation and make housing steadily less affordable for the salaried professionals both parties are courting. Managing consent here mostly means not discussing land and housing policy in any serious way at all, since a real conversation would force the state to choose a side.

The salary class and its own precarity. Bank staff, telecom workers, NGO employees, and senior civil servants are told, essentially, that stability, of the currency, of tax policy, of their relative position above the informal economy, is the prize on offer if their party wins. Their consent has to be re-secured constantly, because they are also the group most exposed to currency shocks and IMF-driven austerity, and their loyalty swings hardest whenever that promise of stability breaks.

Traders and transport owners. Market women, trotro and taxi owners, and small importers hold real disruptive power, a market shutdown or a transport strike can move a government, but that power is consistently managed downward into fuel-price adjustments and small tax concessions rather than allowed to develop into anything more structural. Neither party has any interest in helping this group discover the scale of the power it already has.

Gig and app workers. A newer group entirely outside existing consent-management vocabulary: delivery riders, ride-hailing drivers, freelance graduates. They are managed almost entirely through aspiration, entrepreneurship talk, digitisation slogans, "the youth" as a marketing category, because no party has yet had to develop a real response to a workforce this large with no employer to negotiate against and no union.

What remains of the industrial working class. Factory, mine, and construction workers are governed through a trade union settlement, inherited from decades of post-adjustment negotiation, that has largely converted union leadership into a partner in wage bargaining rather than a threat to the model itself. Consent here was won a generation ago and is now mostly maintained by default.

A peasantry treated as one, managed as several. Cocoa farmers are consistently addressed by both parties as a single grateful constituency, even though a small layer of larger, better-resourced farmers sits above a much larger mass of smallholders receiving a government-set price that has repeatedly failed to track world prices or input costs. Consent here is managed through the producer-price announcement itself, an annual ritual that performs concern while leaving the underlying price mechanism untouched, while food-crop and northern farmers, facing entirely different problems, are barely addressed at all.

The diaspora. Ghanaians abroad are courted as investors and donors more than as citizens, their consent secured through nostalgia, property schemes, and Year-of-Return-style initiatives, while remaining structurally insulated from the daily consequences of the policies they help finance.

Where the management breaks down

The management of consent is not automatic, and it does periodically fail. Currency collapses, IMF programmes, and galamsey's visible destruction of farmland and water have each, at different moments, produced a genuine crisis of consent, a moment where the usual rituals, an apology, a subsidy, a sacked minister, are not enough to restore the sense that the system is basically legitimate. What happens in these moments is instructive: both parties respond not by revisiting the underlying model but by competing harder to be seen managing its consequences better than the other side would. The 2022 debt crisis produced blame, protest, and an IMF programme, but no serious party proposal to change Ghana's relationship to external debt itself. Galamsey has produced task forces, military operations, and years of promises from both parties, but no resolution of the actual conflict between mining capital, desperate smallholders, and the land and water both depend on. Crisis, in other words, gets managed the same way ordinary politics does: as a problem of communication and competence, never as a problem of structure.

The unfinished argument

None of this means consent, once given, is permanent, or that the classes both parties manage are simply passive recipients of persuasion. Market shutdowns happen. Strikes happen. Galamsey protests happen. Currency crises produce real anger that neither party fully controls. But the loudest argument in Ghanaian politics, the one fought out in billboards and manifestos every four years, remains an argument over who manages consent better within a settlement neither party will name as a settlement, let alone put up for real debate. Until the underlying question is asked directly, who sets the cocoa price, who owns the land under Accra's rising rents, who pays for the next IMF adjustment, and who decides, the next time the cedi comes under pressure, which class absorbs the cost of defending it, Ghana's political competition will keep producing the same result under different colours: two parties, each highly skilled at manufacturing agreement to an arrangement that was never actually agreed to, competing not over what kind of country Ghana should become, but over who gets to manage the consent required to keep it as it is.

Sumaila Mohammed is an Activist and a blogger with the Pan-African Progressive Front