admin“We are going to court,” New Patriotic Party chairman Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey told reporters after a meeting of party officials, including its candidate Nana Akufo-Addo.
Stakes in the election held over Friday and Saturday were especially high in the country of 24 million people with a booming economy fueled in part by a new and expanding oil industry. Top officials from the opposition New Patriotic Party gathered at an Accra hotel a day after the party’s candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, said he was not ready to concede defeat and was considering a court challenge. “The national executive committee will meet and then the candidate will make an address,” NPP official Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko told AFP.
According to the electoral commission, Mahama won the election with 50,70 percent of the votes cast, compared with Akufo-Addo’s 47,74 percent. Akufo-Addo, a 68-year-old human rights lawyer, on Monday after his party alleged fraud in the election said that Ghana’s democratic image “shouldn’t be a falsehood”.
A crowd of loyalists had gathered outside Akufo-Addo’s house on Monday in support of the candidate, who lost 2008 elections by less than one percentage point.
Mahama received welcomed support from Washington on Monday as the White House urged all Ghanaians to accept the result of their election and congratulated him on his victory.
Observers from the Commonwealth, West African bloc Ecowas and local group Codeo all said the vote appeared peaceful and transparent.
After the official results were announced, Codeo called them “generally an accurate reflection of how Ghanaians voted in the December 7 polls”, based on the group’s own findings from its observers deployed throughout the country.
The opposition however had issued a scathing statement even before the official results were announced late Sunday.
The 54-year-old Mahama, previously vice president, has only been head of state since July, following the death of his predecessor John Atta Mills. — AFP.
Online Reporter