President Nana Addo Dankkwa Akufo-Addo has indicated that the just-ended December polls through which he was elected for an additional term, was fairly conducted.
Delivering the final State of the Nation Address (SoNA) of his first term of office in Parliament today, Tuesday, 5 January 2021, President Akufo-Addo stated that per the 1992 Constitution, the people of Ghana gave him and the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) “a clear mandate to govern the country for four more years”.
According to him, the second term will afford the government “the opportunity to complete tasks, consolidate some of the far-reaching measures we have introduced and initiate further changes and adjustments to policies and practices”.
Even though the declaration of the results of the election was greeted with rejection and protests by the main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the President commended his main opponent, former President John Dramani Mahama, for resorting to the legal quarters after publicly rejecting the results.
“I recognise that my main opponent in the election, the former President, John Dramani Mahama, has gone to the Supreme Court to seek its intervention over his concerns on the outcome of the polls”.
“It is good for the nation that in the end, he chose the legal path instead of the pockets of violence that have attended the rejection of the results by his party in the period after the elections,” the president said.
President Akufo-Addo, therefore, intimated that “we all have to make a deliberate decision to invest in the rule of law and uphold the integrity of the institutions of our State so that no person or group of persons take the law into their own hands with impunity”.
Out of the 13,119,460 total valid votes cast in the recently-held 7 December 2020 polls, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) polled 6,730,587 votes, representing 51.302 per cent.
His closest contender, Mr Mahama, polled 6,213,182 votes, representing 47.359 per cent.
Mr Mahama and the NDC are, however, contesting the results.
They have described it as a “fictionalised” and “stolen”.
The party has been holding demonstrations across the country to drum home its claim that the election was flawed and skewed in favour of President Akufo-Addo and the NPP.
Some of the demonstrations have been violent.
The NDC filed a petition at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, 30 December 2020 challenging the declaration of the results of the December 7, 2020 presidential election made by Mrs. Jean Mensa, the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission.
Source:cmonline