<<Print>>

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has described the December 7, 2012 elections as the most transparent, free, fair and peaceful ever conducted in the history of Ghana. It said it won the election genuinely and has directed its regional and constituency committees to continue to organise their victory celebration across the country and prepare for the gargantuan swearing in of President John Mahama on January 7, 2013. The General Secretary of the party, Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketiah, who said this at a press conference in Accra yesterday, noted that the introduction of the biometric technology enabled the Electoral Commission (EC) to have the cleanest register ever used in any elections in the country. �The verification equipment eliminated completely the incidence of multiple voting which used to characterise previous elections in Ghana. For the first time, the two major political parties applied their own seals to all ballot boxes in addition to the EC�s seals. �This provided further protection against snatching of ballot boxes,� he said. Mr Nketiah noted that the verification equipment provided a counter check for the manual tallying of voters and the issuing of ballot papers at the polling stations, adding that security personnel deployed in the elections were all trained and given copies of a code of conduct to guide them in the discharge of their duties. All those measures, he said, were �additional to the already existing transparency measures that had been in existence in all previous elections such as the maintenance of party agents by all candidates at all polling stations�. He said President Mahama won in eight of the 10 regions, and that in three of those regions; Upper East, Upper West and Volta Regions, the President won in all the constituencies. Mr Nketiah said in the two regions that Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo won; Ashanti and Eastern Regions, �President Mahama put up the strongest showing ever by any NDC candidate in any elections in the Fourth Republic by obtaining 29 per cent and 43 per cent respectively. In the Parliamentary elections, he said, results declared indicated that the NDC obtained majority of the seats, winning 148 as against NPP�s 123, and that �those parliamentary results were not being challenged by any candidate from the NPP or any other party. �Judging from the facts provided, how can any reasonable Ghanaian doubt the victory of President Mahama and the NDC in the Presidential and Parliamentary elections?� he queried. The NDC General Secretary urged members of the NPP who were interested in the future of their party and democracy in Ghana to stand up and be counted and save the NPP from further embarrassment . �We want to assure the current leadership of the NPP that the negative and anti-democratic activities can neither change the verdict of the masses nor prevent NDC from celebrating its hard won victory,� he said. Mr Nketiah said the conduct of the NPP before, during and after the December 7 elections had portrayed the true nature of the party as a party of violence and democratic pretenders whose means of survival was deception of the masses. The NPP�s claim of rigging, Mr Nketiah said, were unfounded and mentioned some of the results presented by the NPP but were rejected by the EC on Sunday, December 9 because they were not the actual figures. For instance, he said, in Techiman North, the NPP collated total votes cast of 10,519 from only 56 polling stations for President Mahama when the actual results by the EC from the 77 polling stations in the constituency was 16,329. Also in Kintampo South, he said, the NPP collated votes of 12,890 from 84 of the 107 polling stations which actual results by the EC were 16,488 for President Mahama.