A representative from the electoral commission supervises a Ghanian voter. |
Ghanians are awaiting the results of Sunday’s national election. Current President John Kufuor of the New Patriotic Party is stepping down after two terms in office.
Tallies have shown both the ruling and opposition parties leading at varying points throughout the day, as the race is tight.
For more, see the election blog of “Think Ghana,” featuring ongoing updates and citizen reports.
Bright Simons is an executive at the African nonprofit IMANI Center for Policy and Education. He writes at citizen journalism portal OhMyNews about the election and the experience on the ground.
Ghana votes: Who wins, who loses?
Ghanaians are voting as I write.
They are at the polls to elect the sixth democratically chosen President and legislature in the country’s 51 year post-colonial history. Of the 11 regimes that have ruled the former British colony in that period, five have been military insurrectionists.
Most of the streets are deserted, but not from any fear of violence. This is a majority Christian country, and Sundays are normally observed as a Sabbath by many of the 70 percent of the population who profess adherence to the Christian faith. Moreover, the tail-end of this year’s election season has been amazingly calm due to loud clarion calls for peace by the Clergy, eminent members of Ghana’s large Diaspora, and most of the country’s political heavyweights.
As I walked through a peri-urban suburb of the capital, I was struck by the wide observance of the much-emphasized proscription against the overt display of partisan affiliation near any of the 21,000 polling stations across this West African nation of 22 million.
While most of the pre-election polls have seemed to favour the ruling NPP of sitting President John Agyekum Kuffuor and its flagbearer, Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo, scion of a ruling dynasty that stretches back before the time of his father, Ghana’s second democratically elected Head of State, many pundits still say the contest is too close to call.
The opposition NDC has campaigned on a platform of change, though the tone has been angrier and grittier than the genial flavour that coloured the Obama revolution of recent times. That has however not stopped the NDC from insisting, sometimes even brashly, that their mission resonates with that of their Democratic counterparts across the Atlantic.
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