France 24: Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo has won a second term after a tightly contested presidential election, the country’s electoral commission announced Wednesday, beating long-time opponent John Mahama.
Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) received 6,730,413 or 51.59 percent of votes while Mahama of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) received 6,214,889 or 47.36 percent of votes, the commission’s chairwoman Jean Adukwei Mensa said at a press conference.
This comes after police said earlier on Wednesday that five people have been killed in election-related violence in Ghana, casting a shadow over a country hailed for its stable democracy.
Since Monday’s ballot, 21 “cases of electoral violence” have been recorded, six of them involving gunshots, the police said, giving a toll of five dead and 17 wounded.
Polling on Monday was viewed by observers as generally free and fair, but the political climate soured late Tuesday, when Mahama accused his rival of showing “credentials that are very undemocratic”.
Akufo-Addo, he charged, had harnessed the military in a bid to sway the outcome.
“You cannot use the military to try and overturn some of the results in constituencies that we have won. We will resist any attempts to subvert the sovereign will of the Ghanaian people,” the 62-year-old former president said.
Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah told a press conference that allegations of intimidation by soldiers were false.
He also bluntly rejected Mahama’s claim that his centre-left NDC had won a majority, of 140 seats, in the 275-member parliament.
“No candidates at this stage should undermine the work of the EC (electoral commission), it is irresponsible and it would endanger the peace of this country,” Oppong Nkrumah warned.
The European Union’s chief observer, Javier Nart, told a press conference on Wednesday that “Ghanaians voted freely”.
“While there were isolated violent incidents, both on election day and during the campaign … fears of violence and vigilantism fortunately didn’t materialise: they were minor, isolated incidents, some of them tragic ones.”
Mahama and Akufo-Addo, 76, are old rivals who have faced-off at the ballot box twice before.
Mahama was president for four years until 2016, before being succeeded by Akufo-Addo. Both of those elections were determined by small margins.
Despite the death toll and the heated accusations, Ghana has a history of electoral stability and grievances are typically pursued through the courts.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
