Let's ensure a peaceful poll - Adjei-Barwuah

By William Yaw Owusu

Dr Baafour Adjei-Barwuah, former Ghana’s Ambassador to Japan has asked political parties and political actors to guard against acts and utterances that have the tendency to bring chaos in the country during the December poll.

“Ghana has become some kind of a test case or benchmark for measuring the level of democracy practice in Africa. If we falter or fail to hold on to this landable achievement everybody would probably be forgetting about Africa,” he cautioned.

Dr Adjei-Barwuah was speaking to the Times in an interview in Accra on Thursday.

He said “the level of respect and expectation that the international community has for Ghana demands that we conduct this election devoid of acrimony so that we will not waste this opportunity” to further consolidate our democracy”.

He said this year’s general election would focus on which party has been able to move Ghana to an appreciable level of economic growth and development adding “the track record of all the parties would be carefully assessed by the electorate.

Dr Adjei-Barwuah who was one of the 17 presidential aspirants at the December 22, congress of the New Patriotic Party won by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, said the ruling NPP is confident of resounding victory saying ‘we want the results to be uncontestable”.

He said “the NPP is not going to be coast on the governments performance. We will rather intensify our campaign to get the people’s mandate with the hope of improving upon it.

Dr Adjei-Barwuah said “a good proportion of the electorate would accept t hat Nana Akufo-Addo among all the presidential candidates has what it takes to do things differently”.

He said the electorate now have confidence in the NPP led government due to the implementation of good programmes and projects.

“The opposition parties will accept that the NPP is not as abusive as they want the world to believe and I am sure t hat the discerning elect orate have now drawn between the lines”.

He said the NPP would seek the peoples mandate to consolidate the gains made under President Kufuor’s administration, saying “the December poll will determine whether we want to move forward or backwards as a nation.”