Ghana’s Sham Elections leave Democracy Reeling -By Sani Muhammad Uzairu

Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo re-election has been dismissed as a sham by the opposition and diplomats who say democracy has been dealt a crushing blow in one of Africa’s most stable nations.

Akuffo Addo’s win with 51.23 percent of votes was the most controversial margin of victory in a presidential race since the first multi-party vote in 1992, and the opposition has alleged massive fraud.

Even before the December 7 elections, few believed it would be free and fair, after Ghana’s steady decline into autocracy in his first term, with bastardized judiciary, openly biased Electoral Commission, attacks against the opposition and squeezing of press freedom.

This is even as seasoned observers have been stunned by what they see as a brazen effort to completely rid the country of its much respected democratic credentials.

No election anywhere in the world is perfect but the massive rigging that characterized this particular election was just so blatant. The ruling party didn’t care. They decided to take all power and they did it in a way that was so obvious.

Ghana’s democracy is really on a very, very shaky ground.

Aside from the stolen verdict of the presidential election, the ruling NPP used military might and compromised electoral body to overturn results of many parliamentary seats it lost on election day just to gain a numerical advantage in parliament, even when it was obvious that most popular opposition MPs lost their seats.

It was expected that the opposition NDC would take more than half of the parliamentary seats this time round but what happened is actually strange.

Akuffo Addo is hell bent on destroying the gains of Ghana’s democratic experiment, and the African Union and other interest bodies must not wait for Ghana to go the way of Ivory Coast or Mali before they intervene.

Sani Muhammad Uzairu is an edupreneur and University lecturer