Opposition leader John Atta Mills won Ghana’s presidency, defeating his rival in the closest race in the West African country’s history, election officials said Saturday.
It was the third time the 64-year-old tax expert had tried to become president of the world’s No. 2 cocoa producer and the latest African country to discover oil.
Atta Mills(pictured) had served as vice-president under former coup leader Jerry Rawlings, who stepped down in 2001.
Atta Mills won Sunday’s second-round ballot with 50.23 per cent of the vote - or 4,521,032 ballots. Ruling-party candidate Nana Akufo-Addo garnered 49.77 per cent - or 4,480,446 votes, electoral commission chairman Kwadwo Afari-Gyan said.
"The time has come to work together to build a better Ghana," Atta Mills told more than 1,000 supporters outside his campaign headquarters in Accra. "I assure Ghanaians that I will be president for all."
A special revote Friday in a single western district secured Atta Mills’s victory.
The region of Tain had been unable to vote in Sunday’s second round because of a shortage of ballots, and the makeup vote - which took place peacefully despite ruling-party efforts to stop it - became the deciding factor. Atta Mills trounced his rival in Tain, winning 90 per cent of the votes there.
Irregularities reported
Both sides claimed irregularities in other districts, but Afari-Gyan said his agency found that the evidence they submitted was not enough to invalidate the results.
Some analysts had feared possible violence if the election result was not accepted. Kenya was also a model of stability in Africa until a similarly tight 2007 race unleashed weeks of tribal bloodshed.
Ghana is a rare example of democracy in a region of totalitarian states. After coups in the 1970s and 1980s, Rawlings organized elections. He won two terms, then ceded power to Kufuor when his party’s candidate lost in 2000.
Atta Mills, 64, spent his career as a tax law professor and also served as head of Ghana’s tax office under Rawlings.
He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Ghana and earned a doctorate from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies before becoming a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
Credit: cbc.ca
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