Former President Kufuor passes a damning verdict on Akufo-Addo’s latter years in office

Former President John Agyekum Kufuor has given a rare public assessment of Nana Akufo-Addo’s leadership, saying the government started strongly after winning power in 2017 but made several decisions in its later years that he found difficult to understand.

Speaking in a television interview with Deloris Frimpong Manso on the Delay Show, aired on TV3 and published on YouTube on Saturday 6 December 2025, Mr Kufuor praised the Akufo-Addo administration’s early handling of the COVID-19 pandemic but was critical of other major policies.

He highlighted three issues in particular:
1.The National Cathedral project, which he said was first presented as a privately funded initiative but later became a state-funded project that remains unfinished.

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2. The controversial deal involving Power Distribution Services (PDS) and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), which he described as poorly handled.
3. The government’s management of what he called “bond market issues”, which he felt were not dealt with well.

Mr Kufuor, who led Ghana from 2001 to 2009, said he had initially believed the National Cathedral would be a private enterprise, even though public land was provided for it.

The former president also revealed that, despite his senior position in the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), he was never consulted on these key decisions.

The NPP won the 2016 election by a large margin, campaigning heavily on Mr Kufuor’s own record in office, he noted. Yet once in power, the party took a different path from what he expected, especially in the second half of its eight-year term

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Asked what can the NPP do to regain its feet again, his answer was clear: unity.

“You may not like someone in the party, but because of the principles that you shared together – even if we are not friends – because of the principles like democracy, rule of law, you need to come together,” he said. “That is what the people of Ghana want,” Mr Kufuor added.

The former president, who remains one of the NPP’s most respected elders, stressed that rallying around the party’s founding values of democracy and the rule of law is the only way to rebuild public trust and return the NPP to power in the future.