GHANA: The winner has to wait

After one of the closest presidential elections ever, the front-runners are preparing for a run-off vote in less than three weeks’ time

The hard-fought general elections on 7 December saw many national political figures lose their parliamentary seats. Neither of the two leading presidential candidates gained enough votes to win outright in the first round. Amid tough economic times, voters sent a message to both parties that they had reservations about their ability to tackle the looming crisis.

In the presidential elections, the governing New Patriotic Party’s Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo emerged just 1.2% ahead of his rival, John Evans Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress, with 49.13%. A run-off vote between the two front-runners will be held on 28 December. Parliamentary results had not been officially released before Africa Confidential went to press, but the NPP could lose its majority in the 230-seat chamber.

Several NPP members of parliament, including ministers, lost their seats, mainly in coastal Ghana, the Central and Greater Accra regions, and the Northern region. The biggest turnaround was in the Central region, the area from which Professor Atta Mills hails and where he spent the bulk of his time campaigning, following a major defeat for the NDC there in the 2004 elections.

The NDC has overturned the NPP’s majority in Central region; it took 9 of the NPP’s 16 seats to become the biggest party in the region with eleven seats. Ministerial casualties included Stephen Asamoah-Boateng (Information and National Orientation); Samuel Owusu-Agyei (Public Sector Reform); Boniface Abubakar Saddique (Water Resources, Works and Housing) who lost his Salaga seat in the Northern region); Hajia Alima Mahama (Women and Children’s Affairs) who lost in Nalerigu; former Energy Ministers Joseph Kofi Adda (Navrongo) and Aaron Mike Oquaye (Dome, in Accra); and Deputy Health Minister Gladys Norley Ashitey, who narrowly won the hotly-contested Ledzokuku seat in the capital in 2004.



Ghana has never had a parliament controlled by a party opposed to the executive, but this is a possibility if Akufo-Addo maintains his lead in the popular vote in the next round. The NDC has a lead of about five seats, according to results released so far, overturning the NPP’s 128-seat majority, although the four independents and the lone Convention People’s Party (CPP) MP Samia Nkrumah could produce a dead heat if they choose to vote with the NPP. Getting legislation through the House will be a major challenge for the next president.


Nkrumah's legacy

There were also serious defeats on the NDC side: Economics spokesman Ben Kumbuor (Lawra/Nandom); Atta Mills’s campaign spokesman Mahama Ayariga; and Lee Ocran, a former deputy environment minister in the last NDC government. His Jomoro seat in Western region was taken by the CPP’s Nkrumah, daughter of Ghana’s first president, who recently returned from exile to stand in her late father’s hometown.

Her success points to the miserable showing by the minor parties. The CPP flagbearer Paa Kwesi Nduom had been tipped to revitalise the fortunes of the party founded by Kwame Nkrumah in 1949, but took just 1.3% of the presidential vote. The emergence of a true third force in Ghanaian politics to challenge the two main parties has once again been put on hold. And, as at the last elections, the number of rejected ballots (2.4%) amounted to more than the votes won by any of the six minor candidates. The People’s National Convention of Edward Mahama, who was standing for the presidency for a fourth time, saw its support crumble in its traditional strongholds in the northern Upper East and Upper West regions, losing three out of four MPs. Nduom’s articulate and popular campaign style failed to translate into votes because of doubts about his true allegiance to Nkrumahism.

Although both foreign and local observers have praised the Electoral Commission for its conduct of polling day, the Carter Centre’s interim report on the electoral process highlights serious deficiencies in voter registration. Electoral Commission Chairman Kwadwo Afari-Gyan admits to surprise that 1.8 million people turned up to register as new voters in July and August – instead of the expected figure of around half that. There were also critical shortages of registration forms and photographic equipment. Although some 350,000 invalid names were cleaned from the register, questions remain about the credibility of the voters’ roll – all the more important when the margin between the front-running parties is so narrow. This year’s voter turnout was a credible 69.5%, a more than 15% drop from the suspiciously high 85% turnout in 2004. Although the electoral register grew from 10 mn. in 2004 to 12.4 mn. this year, there were about 500,000 fewer valid votes cast in this year’s election.

Without some rapid remedial action on the voters’ register, the Electoral Commission’s failure to manage the registration process and verification with enough rigour may cause more problems in the run-off vote. Election experts attribute the sharp decline in turnout between 2004 and 2008 to better security at the polling stations. Illegal voters were threatened with immediate arrest and detention if caught. Supporters of both main parties were caught trying to register twice, encouraging minors and foreigners to vote, and being bussed to register to transfer their votes to marginal constituencies like Cape Coast and Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem (Nduom’s former seat) in the Central region.


Disenchanted electorate

Young voters are clamouring for a change in economic direction. Their measure is the inadequate number and range of jobs available to school and college-leavers. The failure to create jobs fast enough to absorb the growing jobless queue will be seen as one of the key shortcomings of President John Kufuor NPP’s government – even if the pace of job creation has stepped up during the last two years of boom. The problem for the NPP is that the fruits of the boom are seen to have benefited too narrow a band of middle-class Ghanaians. Unlikely to do well among the urban working classes, the NPP has also lost support in some of its key constituencies in the countryside.

If the NDC wins the second round of the presidential election, it is likely to stop the NPP’s economic reform programme and start a lengthy review of policies and projects, particularly the oil extraction and mining licences awarded over the last five years. As NDC loyalists look for evidence of NPP corruption, they will be pressuring Atta Mills to start up his own patronage networks.

Over the next three weeks, Akufo-Addo will relaunch his campaign with added vigour. He has promised plenty of money for free secondary education, industrial development, energy infrastructure and support for small and medium-scale industries, as well as special projects for development of the Western region, off whose coast the oil has been discovered.

Akufo-Addo’s big campaign spend on massive billboards and sophisticated television adverts may have countered some hostility about worsening economic conditions, but he will have to find bold new tactics to win back the party’s lost support in Accra and Central region. By contrast, Atta Mills feels the momentum is going his way and he just needs to extend his grassroots support to clinch a second-round victory. He will also have to face economic realities: the NDC’s pockets are still much shallower than the the NPP’s, even if his current success wins him new financial backers.

Both candidates are already wooing the band of smaller parties which won just 2% of the vote in the first round of the presidential polls. These groups seem likely to divide their support almost evenly between the NPP’s Akufo-Addo and the NDC’s Atta Mills, making the final result on 28 December even harder to forecast.