Ghana Votes, #GhanaDecides!

It is election day, and while there have been reports elsewhere of difficulties in voting, overall, voting has been pretty smooth, with orderly lines.
Someone is just saying behind me that this is the "shortest line" he has seen. Well...

9 Hours Away from Ghana's Elections on 7 Dec, 2012

We are hours away from Ghana's fifth attempt at its democratic dispensation. Earlier today--around 13h30, it rained heavily--in East Legon. I understand the rain has "spread" to other parts of Accra. Some see it as a sense of foreboding for either of the bigger parties--the National Democratic Congress (incumbent) and the right-of-centre New Patriotic Party--to come back to power, or wrest it from the incumbent.

Some of us claimed we would not vote because we are "tired" of Ghana's politicians. CITI fm's Bernard Avle tried his level-best this morning to encourage those of us who might decided not to vote to re-consider. After all, it is our civic responsibility.

GhanaDecides, the parent project of BloggingGhana, has been doing its very best to encourage people to go and vote, and do it efficiently and wisely.

I encourage those of you who will be voting to do same: efficiently; calmly; and quietly. Ghana first!

See you tomorrow at 7am...in front or the other side of the camera!;-)

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.

As the Week Opens in Accra: Ghanaians and their Pontification of Peace; The Necessity of a Third Political Force for Ghana in the CPP

Yeah, it has been a while. Although I have been alive and well, I have not made time to blog here. Ofcourse, we are approaching the end of the year and I intend to go out with a bang!;-)

First of all, let us just say that it is no news that Ghana pulled off its national elections well, to the extent that we now have a run-off scheduled for 28 december. I have a problem with the whole "peace" concept. I think Ghanaians pontificated over peace so excessively that it blinded them to the virtues of castigating some of the dynamics that characterised the NPP administration. The issues of cocaine and corruption were barely--if ever--touched on, save by the National Democratic Convention who naturally used it for political capital.

This is what I wrote in August 2006:

The Drug Menace
Like a scene right out of Hollywood, the drugs affair exploded into the consciousness of Ghanaians a few weeks ago when some drugs disappeared off a boat, MV Benjamin, when it docked at Tema. Unlike in the 1995 gangster thriller, The Usual Suspects, where $91 million of cocaine in a boat, docked at a pier in South Pedro, just south of L.A., exploded along with the boat, in Ghana, the boat, containing many millions of dollars worth of cocaine, simply disappeared—without a trace.

That is until the revelation of complicity over the drugs, followed by the swift arrest {on the orders of Attorney-General/Minister of Justice Joe Ghartey) of four putative drug barons two days ago at a public hearing under the aegis of Justice Georgina Woode’s eponymous committee that had been set up to look into the disappearance of the 77 parcels of missing cocaine.

Let's just put it on record that the 77 parcels were never found, and that no less than the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has cited West Africa is the quintessential place for the distribution of narcotics only goes to underscore the necessity for the parties to have talked about alleviating this scourge.

But they did not.

Not that affordable housing, or health insurance is not important, but, in my view, a healthy Ghana can agitate more explicitly for all these things.

As regards the Convention People's Party, people failed to vote for the party because it appears they were so keen to oust the incumbent party that they believed it to be a wasted vote. Dr.Nduom's official profile on Facebook only goes to show that the man is popular.

What I am not so sure about is the readiness of Ghanaians for a third force in the country. As one author rightly said on Facebook, Ghana is an NPP-NDC nation.

In my view, it need not be so.

The failure of the financial markets and the acceptance by the West for state support and regulation point to a necessity of what some might call socialist-oriented policies.

The New Statesman magazine put out an article two weeks ago about "Socialism's Comeback".

It seems incongruous that for a country that likes to emulate the West, somehow, we are afraid to discuss issues as contained in the article that point to a resurgence of the State and State-led policies that seek to protect the poor. I'm not talking about protectionism but a fundamental review of the unnecessary divestitures that have characterised the NPP, aas well as a review of the policies that have brought divisions between the rich and poor. I daresay the NDC will toe the line on market-oriented policies once they win--as many hope and believe they will on 28 December.

At the end of the day, I believe there is clear blue water between the NDC and the CPP, and the latter shall arise like the Phoenix in 2012.

Ghana needs a CPP government and a third force.

This duality is unhealthy for the nation.

Ghana Elections Hot Up Tonite!

On the way back to Accra from the Central region some two weeks ago, we were "met" by this noisy bunch behind our car, carrying what looked like the flag of the incumbent administration of the NPP in power...

As they moved closer, it was clear the boisterous boys in the car waving the flags were ineluctably supporters of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

Away they went into the capital. Quick glances of observors revealed some sycophants doing the kangaroo dance that has come to epitomise the motto of the party moving the country forward once they are re-elected on 7 December.

Tonight's presidential debates organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs will go some way to bringing into sharp relief where really the political temperature is at!