Voter apathy and neutrality might get the wrong person elected President of Ghana

We can’t allow that to happen!

I don’t vote.

Read that well, I didn’t write “I don’t know who to vote for”, that would make me an “undecided voter”; neither did I say “I won’t vote”. I don’t vote because I don’t want to. It is a personal decision, but the fact that I don’t vote does not mean I don’t know who I want as president.

I know who I want as president, and I know who should be the president from all indications, ie, campaign messages, economic situation, infrastructural developments (or the overhyped ones) etc. But, I still don’t vote, because somehow, someway, I expect my preferred candidate to win without my votes.

I am a neutral citizen to an extent, but what I truly am is this; I belong to a growing number of 18-to-30-year-olds who will identify themselves as “likely voters” this December. Our collective willingness to “stand in line for hours” outside polling stations in order to vote for the candidate we deem fit is far less than the next member of this “group” would suspect. Millennials have the most stake in how our country precedes. So to what degree will we engage in and be activated by politics now?

It’s an open question. Because, we all think everyone else is going to vote for THAT candidate that we believe must win, we think our no-votes won’t matter. After all, how could the Ghanaian electorate’s view of THAT right candidate be so different from ours?

Up until a week ago, I was so convinced that at least 70% of the electoral populace would revolt against all that John Mahama stood for and vote for another person during the 2016 general elections. But I spent a day at the inauguration of the newly constructed Kwame Nkrumah Interchange and this belief was shaken to the core.

Beyond the usual chaotic din of the JM Toaso, JM Tusu, and “onaapo” chants, there was something else at that rally, something I thought the NDC had lost a lot of, level-headed individuals who genuinely believed that the incumbent John Dramani Mahama was the better choice for Ghanaian come Dec. 7th.

And a good number of my friends are part of these people.

Having grown up on almost the same set of principles, sharing the same values and ethics over the years, I couldn’t understand what drove them to think that John Mahama was the president to maintain for Ghana’s continued development. There are people who are in the JM Toaso camp for the money they get, I am not writing about those people; there are people who have just given up on any hope that a different president would change Ghana, I am not talking about those people too. I am talking about people who have, over the years, shown a higher level of analytical-thinking yet chose to join the “Greenbook” Camp.

I know the above reads condescending on my part when it comes to Mahama-supporters, and even though I want to say that’s not how it is meant to be, I realize that is exactly how it is meant to read. I met people at the launch of the Circle Interchange, whose support for Mahama is not based on gifts, promises or whatsoever, but a clear and definite conviction that John Dramani Mahama is indeed the best person to lead Ghana for another 4 years.

I wanted to exclaim and condemn them, but after speaking with some, I realized that there is this thing that both people who think Mahama should be maintained and those who don’t have in common: A sense of profound confusion about how the other side cannot understand their perspective.

Political divisions between us are greater than they ever have been, and are still getting worse by the day.

And for the first time in my life, I was forced to go back on something I was so adamantly convinced about, that Nana Addo would easily win this election.

I have gone back on a lot of things in my twenty-something years of being alive, a whole lot, but most of those were not things that I had total conviction in. Not my earlier conviction that Ghanaians would SURELY vote out John Dramani Mahama come December 7.