At 76, President Nana Akufo-Addo, a former human rights lawyer and renowned for his sense of diplomacy, was reappointed Wednesday, December 9 for a second term at the head of Ghana, at the end of a very close ballot.
He faced his lifelong political enemy, John Mahama, a man known to be close to the people, who himself ruled the West African country from 2012 to 2016.
The head of state, leader of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) won 51.59% of the vote against 47.36% for the opposition candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), announced Jean Adukwei Mensa, president of the Electoral Commission in a video broadcast live on social networks. Only 515,524 votes separate President Akufo-Addo from his predecessor Mr. Mahama, who became leader of the opposition in 2016.
A flattering economic record
With a round face decked out in small glasses, Akufo-Addo often appears in a good mood and jovial, but always very sure of himself and tenacious.
In a historic speech that toured social networks in 2018 during Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Accra, he asked Africans to get rid of this mentality of dependence, this mentality which leads us to ask ourselves what France can do for us.
By trying to align itself with the great Ghanaian Pan-Africanist presidents like Kwame Nkrumah or Jerry Rawlings, Akufo-Addo has given Ghana an important place on the regional scene, by leading important mediation missions in Guinea or Togo, neighboring countries troubled by serious political and social crises.
He also launched a major awareness campaign across the Atlantic to promote the return
African Americans, descendants of slaves, encouraging them to live and invest in the land of their ancestors.
The economic record of his first term also remains rather positive, and he tried to diversify an economy dependent on primary resources (gold, cocoa and, more recently, oil), and to reduce taxes in the private sector to encourage investment. .
But while Ghana has recorded some of the highest growth rates in the world, it has been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis after some of the strictest containment in Africa, and its growth is expected to fall back to 1.5% this year, its lowest rate in 37 years.
Lawyer, deputy, minister …
Born in 1944 in Accra, the capital, Nana Akufo-Addo grew up in an elite national family and was fed into politics from an early age, his house regularly serving as party headquarters.
His father, Edward Akufo-Addo, was himself president in the late 1960s, and is one of the “Big Six” (the “Big Six”), a term which refers to the fathers of independence and the nation. Ghanaian, the former Gold Coast, a British colony.
He was educated in London, where his unwavering passion for football club Tottenham was born, and from where he drew his particularly polished British accent.
A lawyer specializing in human rights, he practiced in France and England before returning to Ghana. But it was not until 1992, when the country regained democracy after decades of military regimes, that Nana Akufo-Addo joined the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
Throughout his career, as a lawyer, then deputy and minister, he built his solid reputation as an anti-corruption and stubborn slayer, recently tarnished by the resignation of a special prosecutor directly implicating him and the accusing of obstructing his mission.
This second term risks being tarnished by the coronavirus crisis and by a sharp rise in unemployment, which remains one of the major challenges in the country.
His promises have remained relatively modest
, notes Kwesi Jonah, political scientist for the Ghana Institute of Democratic Governance. But they are realistic. […] He knows it’s gonna be very hard to find money
.
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