A group of well-built men besieged the Greater Accra Regional Office of the Electoral Commission of Ghana (EC) on Friday, January 17, 2025.
The thugs besieged the EC office ahead of the 7th attempt to re-collate the parliamentary election results of the Ablekuma North Constituency.
Visuals from the EC office captured by Accra-based TV3 showed parts of the office destroyed.
Louvres of the windows of the offices could be seen broken across the corridor of the EC building.
The chairs, tables, and police barricades in the room where the re-collation exercise was supposed to happen were also scattered all over the place.
According to the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Organiser of the Ablekuma North Constituency, Mr Musah, the damage seen in the office was due to a clash between supporters of his party and those of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
He claimed that he and other executives of the NDC came to the EC office after an invitation for the re-collation exercise, but after getting to the office, they realised that the room where the collation was supposed to take place was full of NPP thugs.
He said they then came out to call for reinforcement before moving into the re-collation centre to face off with the NPP thugs.
Background:
The EC, at the Greater Accra Regional office, on December 10, 2024, declared the candidate of the National Democratic Congress, Ewurabena Aubynn, as the winner for the constituency parliamentary seat, beating NPP’s Nana Akua Owusu Afriyieh, a former MP and the current Deputy Chief Executive of the Coastal Development Authority.
However, the EC later nullified the declaration of Ewurabena Aubynn as Member of Parliament-Elect for the area, stating that the results for the constituency would be re-collated.
The Chairperson of the Commission, Jean Mensa, explained that NDC’s Ewurabena Aubynn was declared the winner of the constituency’s seat without the results of 62 polling stations.
“In the Ablekuma North constituency, 219 polling station results were used to declare a winner instead of 281 polling station results. The Commission would not uphold that declaration,” she said at a press conference.
Since then, there have been six re-collation attempts which have been marred by disagreements on the authenticity of pink sheets presented by some of the parties in the election.
The re-collation follows a High Court ruling on Saturday, January 4, 2025, which granted an application by the NPP seeking to compel the EC to complete the collation of parliamentary results for the constituency.
Justice Forson Agyapong, who presided over the case, ruled in favour of the NPP, issuing an order of mandamus that compelled the EC to complete the collation process.
In his judgment, Justice Agyapong stated that the EC had failed to collate results from 31 outstanding polling stations in the constituency, which was a breach of its obligations.
The court subsequently ordered the EC to collate the results from the remaining polling stations and incorporate them into the already collated figures.
Watch a video from the incident below:
Source: www.ghanaweb.com
