John Mahama
The Flag Bearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the 2020 elections, John Dramani Mahama believes that the Military was used to declare the 2020 elections in favour of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) in some collation centres.
He explained that the deployment of the military forced some officers of the electoral commission to declare wrong results to favour his opponent, Nana Akufo-Addo and the NPP.
Mr. Mahama made the claims when he spoke on Global FM last Monday morning to kick start his one-day “Thank You” tour of the Volta Region.
He said “We won the majority in Parliament, but you saw what happened on the day. In many of the collation centres they injected soldiers and forced the electoral officers to pronounce results that were not real.”
He cited a situation in Sefwi Wiawso where a ballot box got missing in transit, thereby allowing the EC to pronounce the election in favour of the NPP candidate, although he (Mahama) had won the presidential ballot.
According to him, a careful analysis of the incidents that happened during the 2020 elections point to the fact that the NDC won the elections, but the scheming turned the tide in favour of the incumbent NPP at the time.
“But for a lot of scheming that took place, the NDC would have won the election. I do believe that we did win, but a lot of things went untoward and so even though power did not come into our hands, it does not mean we do not have the prospects of winning.”
He was therefore surprised that the Electoral Commission in a recent comment described the 2020 election as the best ever since the inception of the fourth republic.
The Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC), Jean Mensa, described the 2020 general election as historic, transparent, efficient, and cost-effective in a recent interaction with some foreign dignitaries.
She acknowledged that although there were some pockets of electoral and post-electoral violence (61 recorded cases) across the country, the seven lives that are alleged to have been lost did not occur at the polling stations or arise as a result of misconduct on the part of the electoral officers or the commission as a whole.
She therefore urged the security agencies to make public the findings from the investigations conducted into the circumstances that led to the killing of the seven persons during the 2020 general elections because “One life lost is one too many.”
More so, the recommendations will facilitate future learning and make elections in subsequent years better.
Reacting to this, Former President Mahama stressed that the 2020 elections were not transparent because right from the onset the EC had plotted to rig the election for the NPP.
He alleged that “She (Jean Mensah) got a mindset towards rigging the election for the NPP. They have conducted the worst election. You have an EC commissioner that says that NDC was an existential threat to the elections of the country.”
Mr. Mahama noted that the correction of errors by the EC was evidence of rigging. He also alleged the stuffing of ballot boxes and illegal printing of extra ballot papers and stamping of same, as a basis for a rigged election.
Although the president could not prove these claims at the Supreme Court when he contested the election results earlier this year, he noted that as far as he is concerned, “They (EC) have conducted the worst election. They should use the 2024 general elections to redeem themselves.”
From Fred Duodu, Ho (k.duodu@yahoo.com)