The almost one million votes’ margin between the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) in Ghana’s 2016 presidential elections would have been more had the incumbent not rigged the polls in some areas, Maxwell Kofi Jumah, a former chief executive of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly, has claimed.

The December 7 election saw three-time presidential candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo garnering 5,716,026 votes (53.85%) to deny incumbent John Mahama, who only managed 44.40 per cent, translating to 4,713,277 votes, a second term.

Asking if the near-million votes’ gap by which the NPP won was surprising, Mr Jumah, speaking on Ghana Yensom on Accra100.5FM on Thursday December 15, said: “It is no magic,”, explaining that the actual “magic” was in the NDC conceiving the “ridiculous” idea that it would make 1.5 million votes in the Ashanti Region, the NPP’s stronghold, where the registered voter population is less than three million.

According to him, the NDC failed in almost all sectors of the economy, saying the power crisis (dumsor) alone was “enough for any government to lose”, however, the NDC, thinking that Ghana was a country of “retarded people” who could be hoodwinked by government and its assigns’ constant trumpeting of the refrain ‘massive infrastructural development’ to win votes.

However, he said in spite of all the “noise” about infrastructure, the NDC’s performance in that sector was the “worst…in our history”.

He continued: “The other issue is, it (the NDC government) was at loggerheads with all groups of workers. It rowed with nurses, with teachers, with doctors, with students, even the Judicial Service. It has fought with everyone. So who was going to vote for it (the NDC)?” saying on the evidence of the NDC’s unimpressive record at the helm of affairs, he was surprised they lost by only a million votes’ margin.

“For me, the figure they recorded, as low as it was, was still too great. The NPP should have stretched them by over three million votes. …The votes they got, I believe there was rigging,” he told host Chief Jerry Forson.