Mid-Week Madness: How One Celebrated Xmas and Ghana Election 2008

Let me begin by wishing you ALL a profoundly sincere and joyous New Year. May all your dreams come to pass! As you ponder what you would like to see yourself improve over 2009, allow me to bring you a different kind of Accradailyphoto post--that of television pictures. This is because given the intensity of the Ghanaian elections, it is safe to assume a lot of time was spent by Ghanaians in front of the television!

Before I begin, let me just add that Ghana has just recently added a sixth TV station by the name of Viasat 1, so you will forgive me if most of the screen shots were from one TV station--Metro TV. The family spent most of the time shuttling between TV3 and Metro TV, and I have to say that Metro outshone TV3 in terms of graphics, drama, currency. Good stuff.

The pictures below offer you a glimpse of how Ghanaian TV can be. Enjoy!

On 30 December, Ghanaians sat down to their televisions, with radios in tow for good measure, to listen to Dr.Afari-Gyan of Ghana's Electoral Commission was to declare who the winner out of the 28 December run-off would be.

Or was he?



Just to give you a clue: the inimitable Mary-Ann Acolatse, news editor of Metro TV, (pictured here) would facilitate extensive coverage of why Dr.Afari-Gyan was most likely not going to announce a winner. You will see from the screen capture that only 229 out of 230 constituencies had been announced; one would remain...


...and so, the Electoral Commission (EC) boss would give some kind of stay of execution by announcing on the tv networks that the constituency of Tain--a rural constituency in the Brong Ahafo region needed to vote on 2 January, 2009. It would be that vote that would definitively secure the winner of the December 2008 general elections that has been described by the Western media as a "cliff-hanger".


New Year would come...and go...









...and the winner of the Tain voting on 2 January would be declared through provisional results. The screen capture clearly shows that the party to the left of the screen (incumbent [until this afternoon at 13h00 GMT] -- National Patriotic Party (NPP)) received only 9.02% of the votes, with the now-ruling government [as of 14h00 GMT today!] of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) receiving 90.98% of the votes.