How a revered starchy side dish helped choose Ghana’s next president

Vapor from the silver cooking pot billows upwards, so hot that even several feet away, it feels like you are standing in front of an open oven. But Esther Nunoo doesn’t flinch as she leans over to check the rounds of dough bobbing in the boiling water.

Ms. Nunoo is making kenkey, the sticky balls of fermented corn flour that are one of Ghana’s most beloved foods. Served on the side of nearly every popular dish here, kenkey is so embedded in Ghanaian identity that it features in local folklore and even pop music.

And this weekend, it helped pick the country’s next president.

On Saturday, Ghanaians elected opposition candidate John Mahama, who previously served as president between 2012 and 2017.

As was the case in elections around the world this year, many Ghanaians voted with their pocketbooks. The cost of living has been rising sharply here for the last four years. And that’s visible nowhere more than in the ballooning costs of everyday food staples, an issue that was top of mind during the campaign season.

“The prices of kenkey have skyrocketed, and people are unable to afford” it, Mr. Mahama told the crowd at a rally for his National Democratic Congress (NDC) party on Nov. 13.

By invoking the unaffordable cost of the revered starch to explain why voters should choose him, Mr. Mahama was participating in a long-established “part of our political tradition,” explains Kobina Aidoo, a researcher and creator of The Kenkey Index, a kind of Ghanaian Big Mac Index. “Many people will ask the question when they hear all the macroeconomic numbers, ‘What has that got to do with the price of kenkey?’”

A protest vote

Only two hours after the polls closed on Saturday, thousands of people had already poured into the streets of Jamestown, the coastal Accra neighborhood where Ms. Nunoo runs her small restaurant serving kenkey and fried fish.

The votes hadn’t yet been tallied, but the crowds marched past her restaurant carrying a coffin draped in the red, white, and blue colors of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).

“Now we can’t even [afford to] buy kenkey, our own food,” says Leonard Copson, one of Ms. Nunoo’s regulars, explaining why he voted for Mr. Mahama.

The next day his opponent, Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia, the NPP candidate, officially conceded.

“This is a protest vote,” explains Godfred Bokpin, an economist and head of the University of Ghana Business School. “People have opted to punish the government’s failure to admit reality.”

For Ms. Nunoo, the reality is that business is the worst it has ever been in the last four decades. Ingredients are more expensive, and customers have less money. In 2021, she says she sold a ball of kenkey, which comes wrapped in a banana leaf, for 2 Ghanaian cedis (about 13 cents). Today, the price is more than twice that, 5 cedis, which is in line with national figures gathered by The Kenkey Index.

The price hikes were so visible, and so alarming, that Mr. Mahama shouted them out on the campaign trail. And when he did so, he drew on a long political tradition of using kenkey prices as a shorthand for economic crisis.

In 1981, opposition leader Kwaku Baah famously pulled a ball of kenkey from his briefcase during a budget debate, waving it around as he explained how the government’s policies had hurt Ghanaian consumers. In 2012, President John Atta Mills made an unannounced visit to a market in Accra to buy kenkey – and by doing so prove that prices weren’t rising as quickly as his political opposition claimed.

For Mr. Mahama, it was easy to make the link between kenkey prices and his opponent.

The NPP “told us we were sitting on money,” he said during the same rally where he spoke of kenkey price inflation. Instead “we’re faced with severe hardships and battling debts.”

He was referring to the massive economic crisis that Ghana has weathered over the last few years. As recently as 2019, the country was the fastest-growing economy in the world, spurred by increasing prices of gold and cocoa, its major exports, and growth in its manufacturing sector.

But then came the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which caused a surge in the prices of food, fuel, and fertilizer. Meanwhile, after years of out-of-control borrowing and high interest rates, national debt was ballooning, and the economy went into a tailspin. Inflation hit 54% by the end of 2022.

In December 2022, Ghana officially defaulted on much of its debt, forcing it to approach the International Monetary Fund for a $3 billion bailout. As a result of the debt restructuring that followed, many middle class Ghanaians had to exchange their government savings bonds for new ones with lower yields and longer maturity timelines.

A wide disconnect

But for the average Ghanaian, the crisis was felt most acutely in their shopping baskets. Between February 2023 and February 2024, for instance, the cost of eggs and tomatoes more than doubled, according to the Ghana Statistical Service. Meanwhile, poverty in the country is on the rise.

For decades, Ms. Nunoo made her kenkey by running dried ears of corn through an enormous electric grinder. Then she mixed the powder with several gallons of water and left it to ferment, creating a thick dough.

Now, she can no longer afford the electricity costs for the grinder, or the cost of water for producing the mixture. So she buys her dough pre-made, only doing the last step, wrapping and boiling the kenkey balls, herself.

“Politicians always promise honey and give us nothing but this particular government is killing us,” she says.

So when the time came to cast her ballot last week, the decision was easy. She voted for Mr. Mahama.

Indeed, the once-and-future president campaigned heavily on his plans to fix the cost-of-living crisis and create more jobs.

Ironically, he himself was voted out of office in 2016 after a single term in part for failing to deal with economic issues like falling commodity prices and an electricity supply crisis.

“It’s not like we do not remember [the NDC’s] issues,” says Professor Bokpin. But in this election, people were more angry with the “wide disconnect between [the NPP] and the reality on the ground.”

In Jamestown, Ms. Nunoo reacted to the election result with the same unbridled joy as her customers, even shutting down the restaurant early to celebrate. But her hopes for the future are more muted.

“I think that with the new president, things will be slightly better,” she says.