Atta Mills Wins Ghana Presidency, Returning Opposition to Power
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John Atta Mills, leader of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) party, has won the presidency, paving the way for Ghana to again demonstrate its standing as an established democracy in which a peaceful transfer of power is the accepted process.
Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, chairman of Ghana’s Electoral Commission, released the official figures today, in the capital Accra. According to the Electoral Commission’s final count, Atta Mills won with 50.23% of the vote, defeating Nana Akufo-Addo of the National Patriotic Party (NPP) who garnered a strong 49.77%. The narrow election victory does not necessarily leave Atta Mills with an overwhelming mandate, but seems to be enough to give him an outright majority and therefore the presidency.
The African Elections Project (AEP) reports from Accra that the commission’s certified results showed that the NDC won 4,521,032 votes and the NPP 4,480,446 votes. The commission said 72.91 percent of the country’s 12,472,758 voters had cast ballots.
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Atta Mills had run twice before, losing on both occasions, in 2000 and 2004, to now outgoing president John Kufuor. In what could have been a serious question about the legitimacy of Atta Mills’ victory, the western Ghanaian constituency of Tain saw “problems with ballot papers” and a lead for Atta Mills “so narrow that the electoral commission judged that the outcome in Tain had the potential to overturn [the entire election outcome].”
Also according to AllAfrica:
Earlier in the week both the NPP and NDC made allegations of electoral irregularities, in the Volta and Ashanti regions respectively. The electoral commission said on Saturday that neither party had been able to provide sufficient evidence to invalidate the result.
That significant irregularities were not demonstrated, even given the close final results, is considered by observers to be a good sign for Ghana, and for the stability of its democratic processes. The AP notes that: “Ghana is a rare example of democracy in a region of totalitarian states. After coups in the 1970s and 1980s, coup leader Jerry Rawlings organized elections.” After Rawlings won two terms, he peacefully turned over power when the candidate for his party lost to Kufuor in 2000.
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