Ghana

Ghana’s top court has ordered more than 56,000 names to be deleted from the electoral register as the country prepares for general elections in November.

The West African country’s Supreme Court ordered on Tuesday that the names be struck from the roll since they had registered with invalid identity cards, Africa News reported. The affected persons used national health insurance cards to register and will be allowed to re-register using valid forms of identification once the exercise is complete.

Ghana’s electoral register is not yet prepared for the polls, which are due to take place on November 7 and will pit incumbent President John Dramani Mahama against opposition leader Nana Akufo-Addo, who has unsuccessfully stood for the presidency at the past two elections in 2008 and 2012.

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission of Ghana, Eric Dzakpasu, recently told Voice of America that the body was implementing measures to ensure the vote would go ahead smoothly, which include exhibiting the register between July 18 and August 7 for voters to check their details or re-register if necessary.

One of West Africa’s most stable countries, Ghana transitioned from military rule to multiparty democracy in 1992 and has held largely peaceful elections since then. The Ghanaian inspector-general of police, John Kudalor, has assured the population that the police force would be adequately equipped to deal with any disturbances in the run-up to the election.

Kudalor said that police were undergoing public order management training and that security forces would make sure “we act impartially and professionally during the elections so that the outcome of the polls would be wholly accepted by all the political parties and their leaders.”

Other major challenges ahead of the election include an energy crisis that saw the government employ a policy of load-shedding or rolling blackouts—where electricity in different parts of the country was cut at different periods of time—that was popularly described as dumsor, a Ghanaian term used to describe the unpredictable outages.

Mahama said Wednesday that the country would not return to the policy, blaming current energy sources on a spate of militant attacks on oil facilities in neighboring Nigeria, which is one of Ghana’s main trading partners

Customers peruse goods at Makola market in Accra, Ghana.

ACCRA (Reuters) – Ghana and Togo are the next targets for Islamist militants following high-profile attacks this year in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast, according to a memo from Ghana’s Immigration Service.

The memo calls for better border protection in the latest sign of a heightened government response to the threat to West Africa by militants based in northern Mali who have stepped up a campaign of violence in the last year.

It says the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) has evidence from neighbouring Ivory Coast from the interrogation of a man suspected of orchestrating an attack on March 13 in which 18 people were killed. [nL5N16M30G]

“Intelligence gathered by the … NSCS indicates a possible terrorist attack on the country is real. … The choice of Ghana according to the report is to take away the perception that only Francophone countries are the target,” said the memo, dated April 9 and published by Ghanaian media.

It ordered immigration agents on the northern border with Burkina Faso to be extra vigilant and said patrols should be stepped up along informal routes between the two countries.

Ghana is one of Africa’s most stable and peaceful democracies and has not suffered an attack by Islamist militants. Togo is the country’s eastern neighbour.

President John Mahama spoke about the memo in an interview on state radio’s Sunrise FM on Thursday. He asked for public vigilance and said Ghana was also at risk from home grown militants, while noting that countries in the region share intelligence on militant threats.

“We must deal with this without creating panic amongst our people,” he said, adding that the memo should not have detailed the intelligence on which its calls for greater vigilance were based.

Government spokesmen in the presidency and at the immigration ministry did not return calls requesting comment.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has claimed responsibility for attacks on a hotel in the capital of Mali last November, a restaurant and hotel in Burkina Faso’s capital in January and the Ivory Coast attack. In all, more than 65 people have died, many of them foreigners.

Ghana government memo warns of possible militant attack

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