By Gifty Boateng
Dr. Samuel Ofosu Ampofo has spent most of his adult life inside Ghana’s political communication machine. As a former National Democratic Congress chairman, he knows how a message is crafted, how it is tested, and how it is deployed to move votes. So when he says the machine is broken, it is worth listening.
Speaking at the launch of Voices for the Ballots: Electoral Communication in Ghana, a new book by veteran journalist and communications strategist Nana Sifa Twum, Ofosu Ampofo argued that political messaging in Ghana has been reduced to a single objective: winning power.
The broader purpose of democratic communication educating citizens, deepening participation, building informed electorates has been lost.
“Electoral communication must go beyond winning votes,” Ofosu Ampofo said, according to a transcript of his remarks. It must “strengthen democracy and promote responsible citizenship.”
It is a diagnosis that will be familiar to anyone who has watched a Ghanaian election cycle up close. The billboards, the radio serial callers, the WhatsApp forwards, the rallies all of it is designed to do one thing: get a candidate across the line. What happens after the line is crossed, or what voters understand about their own role in the process, is treated as an afterthought.
Nana Sifa Twum, the author, has spent decades on the other side of the microphone. He has worked for Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, TV3, the National Pensions Regulatory Authority, the British High Commission, and the International Organization for Migration. His career has spanned journalism, public relations, strategic communication, and public diplomacy. He has seen how messages are made and how they are received.
His book introduces what he calls the Communicative Alignment Theory, developed from research in four regions of Ghana. The theory identifies five interconnected elements of effective electoral communication: the message, the messenger, the medium, voter cognition, and feedback.
The messenger, Twum argues, matters as much as the message. A well-crafted manifesto delivered by a candidate who lacks credibility, reputation, or public trust will fail. Voters are not passive recipients. They interpret, filter, and transmit. If they do not believe the person speaking, they will not believe what is being said.
“Even a well-crafted political manifesto could fail to influence voters if delivered by a messenger lacking credibility,” Twum said.
This is not an abstract observation. It is a description of how Ghanaian politics actually works. The most sophisticated policy document in the world cannot compete with a messenger who is seen as corrupt, incompetent, or out of touch. The 2024 general elections demonstrated this clearly: campaign messages that resonated were not necessarily the most detailed or the most generously funded. They were the ones delivered by people voters trusted.
One of the book’s most incisive contributions, according to a reviewer who spoke at the launch, is its examination of what Twum calls “megaphone politics”—the way campaign messages travel through market women, religious leaders, traditional authorities, radio presenters, serial callers, party activists, and WhatsApp groups.
These are the real transmission belts of Ghanaian politics. A party’s message does not go directly from headquarters to voters. It passes through a chain of intermediaries, each of whom interprets, adapts, and sometimes distorts it. A market woman who supports a candidate will repeat the message to her customers. A radio presenter will frame it for his audience. A WhatsApp group administrator will decide which forwards to share and which to ignore.
Understanding these networks is essential to understanding why some campaigns succeed and others fail. A party that treats communication as a top-down exercise headquarters issues a statement, the media reports it, voters absorb it will lose to a party that understands how messages actually travel.
The reviewer noted that Ghana’s cultural, linguistic, religious, and regional diversity makes this even more complex. A message that resonates in Accra may fall flat in Kumasi. A messenger who is trusted in one community may be viewed with suspicion in another. Political communicators must understand the audiences they are trying to reach, not just the messages they want to send.
The book also addresses what may be the defining challenge of contemporary electoral communication: the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation.
Digital platforms have expanded the speed and reach of political communication. They have also created opportunities for unverified allegations and manipulated information to spread faster than corrections can follow. A false claim can reach millions of people before a fact-checker has finished reading it.
Twum’s book examines this problem in the Ghanaian context. It raises concerns about inflammatory political rhetoric, media fairness, and the role of electoral institutions in providing clear and timely information. It calls on political parties to communicate responsibly, journalists to uphold accuracy and independence, and civil society organisations to help citizens distinguish verified information from rumours and deliberate falsehoods.
The reviewer at the launch cautioned that voters are not merely passive recipients of political messages. They are active interpreters and transmitters. They can reshape the information they receive, share it with their networks, and challenge it when they believe it is false. But they need the tools to do so. Media literacy, civic education, and trustworthy information sources are essential.
The book’s examination of the 2024 general elections is its most immediate contribution to Ghana’s political discourse. Rather than simply identifying winners and losers, Twum analyzes why certain messages resonated with voters and others did not. He examines how campaign messages, candidates’ credibility, media channels, and voters’ economic and social experiences influenced the outcome.
The reviewer noted that the book moves beyond the horse-race framing that dominates most election coverage. It asks deeper questions: Why did voters trust some messengers and not others? Why did some messages spread through grassroots networks while others remained confined to party platforms? What role did economic hardship, social identity, and local grievances play in shaping voter behavior?
The answers are not simple, but the book’s argument is clear: political parties must pay greater attention to the quality, credibility, and relevance of their communication, not just the volume. A campaign that shouts louder but says nothing that voters believe will lose to a campaign that speaks quietly but speaks truth.
Twum used the launch to propose a series of workshops and public dialogues across the country to examine electoral communication practices and promote more responsible political messaging. The goal is not to tell parties what to say, but to help them understand how their messages are received, interpreted, and acted upon.
It is a modest proposal in the context of Ghana’s polarized political environment. But it is also a necessary one. The country’s democracy depends not just on the integrity of its elections the mechanics of voting, the counting of ballots, the adjudication of disputes but on the quality of its democratic conversation.
If voters do not understand what is at stake, if they cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood, if they do not trust the messengers who seek their support, then the mechanics of democracy become hollow. Elections become rituals. Participation becomes performance.
Ofosu Ampofo’s call for a “fundamental shift” in electoral communication is not a partisan complaint. It is a warning. The tools of political communication have never been more powerful, or more dangerous. How Ghana uses them will determine the future of its democracy.