Ghana opposition party calls on Mahama to concede election defeat

“We in the NPP are quietly confident that we have won a famous and historic victory”, Akufo-Addo told hundreds of supporters who danced and sang in the garden of his house in the capital.

President John Mahama accused Ghana’s main opposition leader of deliberately undermining confidence in the voting process before Wednesday’s election by failing to issue a clear call for peace whatever the outcome. “We will wait till the Ec declares the result”, he vowed.

However, incumbent President John Mahama and his ruling NDC party have not conceded defeat.

Addressing a media conference here Thursday, Commissioner of Police Christian Tetteh Yohuno, who is the Director-General of Operations of the Ghana Police Service, said there seemed to be rising tension in the aftermath of the counting of ballots.

This election marks the third time Akufo-Addo has run for president.

The provisional result showed that The New Patriotic Party (NPP) candidate, who twice lost the presidential election, had defeated President John Dramani Mahama.

After voting on Wednesday, Mahama voiced confidence the election would “consolidate that democracy further”.

An exporter of gold, cocoa and oil, Ghana was once hailed as a regional growth model but has now taken on too much debt, and in 2015 had to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout.

Akufo-Addo’s New Patriotic Party says the government has mismanaged national finances, including revenue from oil from an offshore field operated by British company Tullow that became operational in 2010.

“It’s going to be an anxious time, I know, until the results are formally declared, but we have been through this before and we should be able to go through it again”, Akufo-Addo said.

Ghanaians will also elect 275 members of parliament. Mahama, who led the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) to power in 2012 has about 3,765,537 representing 44.8% of the total votes from 214 constituencies, making it statistically hard to obtain the required 50% plus 1 mark. Parliamentary candidates must be Ghanaian citizens at least 21 years old, and either be resident in their constituency or have lived there for at least five of the ten years prior to the election.

The commission urged people to ignore what it called “fake results” that have been circulating online after the website was taken down.

The NDC has based its electoral campaign message on President Mahama’s achievements over the past four years in terms of infrastructure expansion such as the construction of the Kwame Nkrumah and the Kasoa interchanges and the building of 123 Community Day Senior High Schools and roads. “We can not manipulate those results”, she said.