Ghana‘s incumbent President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo won the country’s national election, defeating former President John Mahama, electoral commissioner Jean Adukwei Mensa said.
Crowds of jubilant supporters gathered outside the house of the 76-year-old New Patriotic Party (NPP) leader, who had already claimed victory in a series of his campaign tour, few days voting took place.
He polled 6,730, 413 which is 51.59% of the total votes cast nationwide on December 7.
Akufo-Addo defeated his closest contender, John Mahama of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) polled 6, 214, 889 which gives him 47.36% of the total votes cast.
Akufo-Addo campaigned on the need to consolidate the achievements of his first term, including free senior-secondary school education, an industrialization drive and the bolstering of farmers’ incomes in world’s second-largest cocoa producer.
Nana had a solid economic record prior to the advent of the coronavirus. In a country where gold and cocoa production have dominated exports for decades, output from new oil fields pushed economic growth above 6% for each of the past three years. Inflation slowed to less than 10% for the first time in six years in 2018, and remained below that level until April this year. The cedi has had its most stable spell in more than a decade.
Investors are expecting Akufo-Addo to sort out an economy wreaked by the havoc of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has driven Ghana’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product to 71% in September, the highest in four years. Before the global health crisis, the West African economy was already under fiscal pressure due to the costs of cleaning up the banking sector and energy-sector liabilities.
Akufo-Addo’s NPP has said it will cut the budget deficit to 8.3% of GDP in 2021, from a shortfall forecast to reach 11.4% for 2020. The government, which was forced to abandon a fiscal rule it introduced in 2018 to cap the deficit at 5% of GDP, has said it will drop below the cap by the third year of the new presidential term.
