Voting began yesterday in a remote farming region of Ghana in an election that will determine the outcome of the presidential vote of a country seen as a model of democracy in west Africa. Polling stations in the region bordering Ivory Coast were set to close at 5pm, despite a move by Ghana’s ruling New Patriotic Front (NPP) party to stop the election from taking place in Tain.
The NPP, which lost control of parliament in an election last month, had tried to have yesterday’s voting in Tain postponed for security reasons and said on Thursday it would not take part in the vote.
An AFP photographer said agents of the ruling party were absent from polling stations.
Tain, which measures the equivalent of just 65km up and across, is the last of Ghana’s 230 constituencies to vote.
Problems with distributing ballot papers had halted Tain’s participation in a runoff poll on Sunday.
Partial election results from 229 constituencies have shown opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) candidate John Atta-Mills holding a thin lead of around 23,000 votes over ruling party rival Nana Akufo-Addo.
Akufo-Addo won the first round of voting on Dec. 7, but not with enough votes to make him the outright winner.
On Thursday, the ruling party had sought an injunction to stop the electoral commission from announcing poll results before investigating what the NPP alleged were irregularities in Sunday’s vote in an opposition stronghold.
It then also sought a court order to prevent the election from taking place in Tain yesterday.
Stakes have been high in the race to choose the man who will be governing the former British colony, known as the Gold Coast before independence in 1957, when it starts pumping oil next year.
The election has been the country’s fifth since the return to multi-party democracy in 1992 — to succeed John Kufuor, one of Africa’s most respected leaders who has to stand down after two terms.
“I want to vote so that we can end this tussle,” pensioner Kwadwo Adjei said as he waited to vote at a health center in Nkawkaw.
Around 50 people lined up patiently while electoral officials prepared voting materials, but there was no representative from Akufo-Addo’s NPP.
With just over 23,000 votes separating the two main candidates after ballots were counted from Ghana’s 229 other constituencies, Tain’s 53,000 electors will decide the outcome, thrusting the sleepy farming area into the political limelight.
Hundreds of soldiers and armed police have been deployed in Tain to ensure calm during the election, but witnesses and observers said the situation appeared calm yesterday.
Mills led in Tain in an inconclusive first round on Dec. 7, meaning Akufo-Addo would require a landslide swing in voter loyalties there to win the national vote.
It was unclear when an official result would be declared.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS