After a bitterly fought campaign,
Ghana’s main opposition leader former foreign minister, Nana Akufo-Addo
who was making his third bid for the top job, yesterday won the
country’s national election, defeating imcumbent President, John Mahama,
electoral commissioner Charlotte Osei said.
“It is my duty and my privilege to
declare Nana Akufo-Addo as the president-elect of Ghana,” she told a
news conference in the capital on Friday.
Crowds of jubilant supporters gathered
outside the house of the 72-year-old New Patriotic Party (NPP) leader,
who had already claimed victory on Thursday, a day after the voting took place.
Following the footsteps of Nigeria’s
ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, who called the then All Progressives
Congress, APC candidate, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, to concede defeat in the
2015 Presidential election, even before vote tally had been concluded,
Ghanaian’s incumbent President, John Mahama of the National Democratic
Congress (NDC), also called Nana Akufo-Addo, his major opponent in the
presidential election, to concede defeat and congratulate him on his
victory.
Prior to Osei’s announcement, Akufo-Addo
said on Twitter that Mahama called him “congratulating me on winning
the 2016 Presidential Election”.
Ghana’s state television also confirmed Maham’s concession.
In a change of leadership, Nana
Akufo-Addo, will be the country’s new president. This was Akufo-Addo’s
third bid for the country’s presidency after he narrowly lost out in
elections in 2008 and 2012.
Akufo-Addo won convincingly this time
with 53.85% of the vote, according to Ghana’s Electoral Commission. The
incumbent won just 44.4%.
Mahama, despite touting several
infrastructure projects, lost out in an election that shaped up to be a
referendum on his handling of the economy. Under Mahama, Ghana’s
economy, affected by a global crash in commodity prices, has stuttered
to its slowest growth rate in more than two decades. Akufo-Addo
consistently cited the handling of the economy as a reason to vote out
the incumbent.
Even though official confirmation comes
two days after the close of polls on December 7, local media had already
projected a win for Akufo-Addo.
The former foreign minister,
Akufo-Addo’s win continues a trend of consistently peaceful elections
and transition of power in Ghana which has seen it become regarded as
one of the continent’s most stable democracies.
This year, like most others, elections
were largely peaceful and despite what the incumbent’s party had
described as an irresponsible preemptive declaration of victory by
Akufo-Addo and his New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mahama promised to
“respect the outcome of the election, positive or negative.”
Prior to the election announcements
after a long wait, especially with the delay by the election commission
whose systems broke down, seeing them faxing polling sheets from 29,000
stations.
Earlier, Mahama appealed for calm and
told his supporters he would respect the outcome of the vote whether he
won or lost, in comments aimed at defusing tension ahead of the release
of official results of the vote.
“I want to assure the nation that we
will respect the outcome of the election, positive or negative, and so
let us just be calm,” he told supporters gathered outside his house.
Mahama, who came to power in 2012 after
beating Akufo-Addo, urged voters to “stay the course”, promising to
deliver more infrastructure projects.
Ghana’s elections have been historically
close, with Mahama narrowly winning against Akufo-Addo in 2012 with
50.7 percent. Akufo-Addo unsuccessfully challenged Mahama’s victory in
the courts.
Ghana is the world’s second biggest
producer of cocoa after Ivory Coast and Africa’s second biggest gold
producer after South Africa.
But it was forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2015 for a bailout as global commodity prices tanked.
0 comments:
Post a Comment