Ablekuma North- When Intransigent Political Machinations, A Weak Police & Vacillating Electoral Commission Defeats the Democracy

The Electoral Commission (EC) of Ghana has announced its intention to rerun parliamentary elections in nineteen (19) of the polling stations at Ablekuma North Constituency.
The EC was unable to declare a winning candidate for that constituency due to the acts of violence and intimidation engaged in by the two major political parties in Ghana, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
Indeed, officials of the Electoral Commission were unable to declare a winner because conditions for so doing had been made unsafe, and the Ghana Police Service, charged with providing security, had been unable to carry out its mandate.
The intransigent positioning of the two parties, the weakness of the Ghana Police Service, and the inability of the EC to bulldoze the available results through, means that on the day, the democracy we claim to practice failed the people of Ablekuma North.
Ghana claims to be a democracy; its 1992 Constitution guarantees it.
However, the democracy would hardly work when the various actors fail to behave rationally.
Political parties and players are expected to play by the rules and to allow the democratic process to go on without intimidation.
The Electoral Commission is supposed to be a fair and impartial arbiter, and the Ghana Police Service is to ensure adequate security.
The reality in Ghana, however, is that political parties and players behave like thugs and thieves willing to do anything and everything under the sun to win.
The EC and its officials regularly compromise their independence by towing the line of the political actors, and the police monitor the political wind with a keen nose to sense the power dynamics before they do their job.
When these things happen, the democracy, which is just a concept written on paper, more likely than not, would fail.
The EC’s decision to rerun the election in just 19 polling stations is unwise, and obviously intended to favour one of the two political parties.
Instead rerunning the election in 19 polling stations, it should go back to the results it managed to collect on December 7th, 2024, and declare the results on those.
Laws are laws; the EC is not expected to go about making up new ones to suit convenience, when its own systems have failed.
A valid election was held on December 7, 2024. What is expected of the EC is to deliver an outcome on that election.
It should just do so.
(Editorial of the Daily Searchlight of 7th July, 2025).