Election 2020: Incumbent MPs losing their seats was no shock - UG Lecturer

Senior Lecturer at the University of Ghana’s Department of Political Science, Dr.Isaac Owusu-Mensah, has said that it is no shock that most incumbent Members of Parliament (MPs) lost their seats in the 2020 general elections.

According to him, the research conducted by the university prior to the elections revealed that many Ghanaians were not impressed with the work of some of the MPs.

Speaking to Samuel Eshun on E.TV Ghana’s Fact Sheet show, he said: “We were not surprised about what has happened at parliament because in the mean time in 2019, we did a research on the performance of MPs and we noticed that a lot of them were going to lose their seat. Fortunately for the NPP some of them lost in the primaries”.

He also expressed the same sentiment about the outcome of the presidential elections when he said: “Some of us were not surprised with the results. It was the results that we projected. We projected 51.7 percent for Akufo-Addo”.

Speaking further on the general mood of the 2020 elections, Dr. Owusu-Mensah shared that he was impressed with the conduct of the election and encouraged all Ghanaians to be proud of how far we have come amid the pandemic.

Out of the 275 seats, 33 incumbent New Patriotic Party (NPP) MPs lost their seats in the December 7 elections while 18 incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC) MPs also lost.

Prior to the Parliamentary elections, 41 incumbent NPP MPs and 10 NDC MPs lost the primaries.

4 NPP MPs voluntarily decided to not contest again. On the part of the NDC, 7 MPs are retiring.