Writer: Philip Kwasi Appiah
Politics, on the surface, looks like a contest of manifestos, rallies, and ballot papers. But beneath the podium speeches and party colors lies a far messier human drama one made of broken friendships, prison cells turned campaign offices, grieving spouses thrust into ballots, and quiet financial disappointments that push loyal party men into the arms of their former rivals. This piece looks at four of those hidden currents, with real cases from Ghana and beyond.
1. When Comrades Become Enemies
Few things are as jarring in politics as watching yesterday’s closest allies become today’s fiercest rivals. It happens because political partnerships are rarely built on friendship alone, they are built on shared ambition, and ambition has a short shelf life once power is within reach.
Ghana’s own founding political history carries this scar. The United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), which brought Kwame Nkrumah into frontline politics, split apart when Nkrumah broke away to form the Convention People’s Party (CPP). Nkrumah and his former UGCC colleagues, including J.B. Danquah, went from allies in the independence struggle to bitter political opponents whose rivalry shaped Ghana’s first party system.
Internationally, one of the starkest modern examples is the falling-out between Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the cleric Fethullah Gülen. The two were once so closely aligned that Gülen’s movement was widely credited with helping Erdoğan’s AK Party consolidate power in the 2000s. Within a decade, Erdoğan was accusing Gülen’s network of orchestrating a corruption probe against his government and, later, the failed 2016 coup attempt turning a political alliance into one of the most consequential enmities in recent Turkish history.
Zimbabwe offers another example: Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa fought side by side in the liberation struggle and governed together for decades, with Mnangagwa serving as Mugabe’s vice president and presumed successor. That comradeship ended in 2017, when Mnangagwa sacked by Mugabe days earlier returned from exile at the head of a military-backed takeover that forced Mugabe to resign.
2. Rooting for the Jailed to Contest
It seems paradoxical: a candidate behind bars, and a public still willing to vote for them. Yet this has happened repeatedly, often because supporters view the imprisonment itself as evidence of persecution rather than guilt.
The most striking recent case is Pakistan’s Imran Khan. Convicted in 2023 and 2024 on charges he says were politically motivated, Khan was barred from contesting and his party stripped of its ballot symbol. Yet independent candidates backed by his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party still surprised observers by winning the largest bloc of seats in the February 2024 general election. Some of his candidates campaigned from hiding or addressing rallies through video screens because they feared arrest themselves.
Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva lived a similar arc in reverse order: convicted on corruption charges in 2017 and imprisoned in 2018, he was barred from the 2018 presidential race. After his conviction was later announced, he returned to contest and won the 2022 presidential election, completing one of the more remarkable prison-to-presidency comebacks in modern democratic history.
Pakistan has form here too. Former President Asif Ali Zardari was elected to the National Assembly and later the Senate while serving time in a Karachi prison in the 1990s, on charges that were never proven. And in the United States, labour leader Eugene V. Debs ran his fifth and final presidential campaign in 1920 from an Atlanta penitentiary under the slogan “Convict No. 9653,” still drawing roughly a million votes despite being behind bars.
Ghana’s Bernard Antwi Boasuako alias Chairman Wontumi of the opposition New Patriotic Party was recently convicted and jailed for twenty years in prison for his role in the fight against” Galamsey a name giving to illegal mining in the country” has been urged by his party supporters to contest for their party’s upcoming national election as their chairman whilst serving his jail term. Some even though concede he was wrong whilst others think he was wrongfully convicted have even gone to the extent of pleading with the current president to pardon him so that he can have his freedom to cost the enviable position in their national congress which is to be held later in the year
3. Marriage, Succession, and Suspicion in Ghana’s “Widow Politics”
Ghana has developed a striking and now well-documented political pattern: when a sitting Member of Parliament dies in office, it is increasingly the spouse usually the widow who is called upon, or who steps forward, to contest the resulting by-election.
Lydia Alhassan took over the Ayawaso West Wuogon seat after the death of her husband, Emmanuel Kyeremanteng Agyarko, in 2019, and went on to win re-election in 2020. Ophelia Hayford, a police officer, resigned her post to succeed her husband Ekow Quansah Hayford after he was killed by suspected armed robbers just weeks before the 2020 general election. Lydia Akanvariba Lamisi succeeded her husband David Adakudugu in the Tempane constituency after his sudden death in 2019, and Linda Obenewaa Ocloo took up the Shai Osudoku seat her husband Desmond Ocloo had won but never got to occupy before his death. As recently as early 2026, Hajia Amina Adam, widow of the late Ayawaso East MP Naser Toure Mahama, entered the race to succeed her husband, continuing what commentators now openly call a tradition.
This pattern sits at the exact intersection the reader’s question points to. On one hand, it is often read as a genuine expression of grief and a continuation of a late husband’s legacy and unfinished work. On the other, it has generated real tension and suspicion within Ghana’s political culture. Political opponents have not always been kind about it: when Lydia Alhassan first entered Parliament, she was greeted on the floor of the House by opponents taunting her as a “bloody widow” a stark illustration of how quickly grief can be weaponised in partisan politics. More broadly, sudden deaths of politicians in a highly charged, rumor-prone political culture will always invite whispers and conspiracy theories among rival camps, even where no wrongdoing is ever established. Ghanaian political commentary on “widow politics” has itself flagged this tension, noting that the practice blurs the line between genuine personal tragedy and calculated political campaigning precisely the ambiguity that breeds suspicion in a polarised environment.
4. When the Money Isn’t There: Disappointment and Defection
Not every politician who crosses the floor does so over ideology. Many do it because the financial or political rewards they expected from loyalty never materialised.
Ghana’s most prominent recent example is Alan Kyerematen. A former NPP flagbearer aspirant and Trade Minister, Kyerematen broke from the party in September 2023 his second break from the NPP after also resigning in 2008 following a lost flagbearer race to run as an independent candidate in the 2024 election, taking other party figures such as Hopeson Adorye and Yaw Buaben Asamoah with him. Ghanaian political commentators have compiled long running lists of politicians who have made headlines defecting to opposition parties or breaking away to form new political movements over the years, often citing internal marginalisation or unmet expectations as the trigger. And the ruling party the National Democratic Congress has had its fair share of defection as the wife of the Party’s founder who was also known to be a founding member the late Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings broke away to form her own party to contest an election which had her Husband ‘s party despite her husband still recognised as the founder, where as another founding member Dr. Obed Asamoah also broke away from the party to contest against them in the 2008 election with Democratic Freedom Party (DFP). Goosie Tannor the recent head of the 24hour economy secretariat had also broke away to found his own party National Reform Party( NRP) to contest the 2000 election
This is not unique to Ghana. Nigeria has its own well-worn defection cycle, where senior figures regularly cross between the ruling APC and opposition PDP as political fortunes and personal patronage shift even a former national anti-corruption chief has defected between the two parties as the political winds changed. India has a term for this phenomenon going back decades “Aaya Ram Gaya Ram,” literally “Ram came, Ram went” describing legislators who hop parties in pursuit of position or reward. The underlying grievance across all these cases is often the same one raised by disappointed Ghanaian politicians: a sense that years of loyalty and financial sacrifice to the party were never matched by the rewards of office.
The Common Thread
Strip away the party colours and campaign jingles, and politics turns out to be governed by the same forces that govern any other high-stakes human enterprise: ambition, grief, money, and the fear of being left behind. Friends fall out because power cannot always be shared. The imprisoned still find believers because persecution and guilt are not always easy to say apart from the outside. Grieving spouses inherit both a legacy and a target on their back. And loyal soldiers walk away when the ledger stops adding up in their favor.
None of this makes politics uniquely corrupt or uniquely cruel, it simply makes it uniquely visible. What happens quietly in families, friendships, and workplaces everywhere becomes, in politics, a matter of public record.
