Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo won re-election with 51.59 percent of the vote, results from the election commission showed on Wednesday, as deadly violence gripped the West African country.
Akufo-Addo, who ran under the platform of New Patriotic Party (NPP), was declared winner of the election by Jean Mensah, the chairperson of the electoral commission of Ghana on Wednesday evening, December 9.
According to Mensah, Akufo-Addo polled a total of 6,730,430 votes to defeat his main rival and former President John Mahama who polled 6,214,889 votes
Mensah said the total valid votes cast during the election were 30,434,574, representing 79 percent of registered voters.
Blame game
Polling on Monday was viewed by observers as generally free and fair, but the political climate soured late on Tuesday when Mahama accused his rival of showing “credentials that are very undemocratic”.
Akufo-Addo, he alleged, 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.
Mahama made the accusations after rumours circulated on social media that he conceded defeat.
Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah told a news conference allegations of intimidation by soldiers were false.
He also bluntly rejected Mahama’s claim that his centre-left National Democratic Congress (NDC) had won a majority, of 140 seats, in the 275-member parliament.
The European Union’s chief observer, Javier Nart, told a news 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.
Akufo Addo has promised to implement a $17bn programme to boost Ghana’s economy after the coronavirus pandemic hit the price of key oil and cocoa exports, resulting in the first quarterly contraction in nearly 40 years.
He will be under pressure to rein in government spending that has pushed the debt-to-GDP ratio past 70 percent and prompted warnings from the International Monetary Fund.
