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Ghana: Supreme Court will uphold Mahama win after opposition fails to provide evidence of poll irregularities
Ghana President John Mahama
Ghana’s Supreme Court is expected this week to reject an opposition challenge to President John Mahama’s victory in last year’s close-fought election, legal and political experts said on Wednesday.
The decision, due by Thursday, will end months of legal wrangling that has gripped the cocoa, gold and oil-exporting nation, one of Africa’s brightest economic growth prospects that has built a reputation for political stability.
Mahama won the December election with 50.7 percent of the vote and the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) launched a Supreme Court challenge, alleging fraud and irregularities.
The court’s nine-member panel can either validate Mahama’s win or order a re-run.
“It will be a 7-2 (split) decision, or at worse 6-3 in favor of Mahama,” said Seth Gyekye, a political analyst at the Accra-based Futures think-tank.
Gyekye said evidence provided by the NPP party suggested the need for better training for election workers rather than a reversal of the result.
Ghana is home to one of Africa’s fastest growing economies and is expected to see 8 percent economic growth in 2013.
However, the need to hold another vote would be a blow to efforts to control its budget deficit, which grew to 12.1 percent during the 2012 election year, nearly twice the target.
Mahama took over as president last year when incumbent John Atta Mills died in office. The smooth transition reinforced Ghana’s reputation for political maturity.
Voting in the 2012 election was fraught with delays after hundreds of newly-introduced electronic fingerprint readers failed.
The non-partisan Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO), which had more than 4,000 people across the country, said the vote was generally free and fair.
A senior lawyer who has followed the case but asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the opposition argument had most probably failed to convince the court.
“The status quo is likely to remain because the opposition only proved their case to some extent, but not enough to reverse last year’s declaration by the electoral commission,” he said. Experts say calls for radical election reforms are inevitable.
Both Mahama and Nana Akufo-Addo pledged to accept the ruling and have asked their followers to do same.
Source: Reuters