Ghana Temporarily Closes Land Borders Ahead of Presidential Elections
With less than 24 hours until Ghana’s presidential and parliamentary elections, the Ministry of Interior has announced a temporary closure of all land borders.
In a brief statement on Thursday, 8th December, the sector Minister, Henry Quartey indicated that the measure is intended to safeguard the integrity of the December 7 election. The directive takes immediate effect from Friday, 6th December 2024, and will remain in place until 6:00 pm on Sunday, 8th December 2024.
The Interior Ministry urged:
All citizens, and travellers to and from Ghana, to cooperate with State Security Agencies enforcing this directive.
Ghana shares land borders with Togo to the east, Côte d’Ivoire to the west, and Burkina Faso to the north.
This decision follows an incident in which the Ghana Immigration Service intercepted three booklets of dummy ballot papers at Hevi, in the Akatsi-North District of the Volta Region.
In a statement dated 5th December, the security agency confirmed the arrest of the NDC’s Akatsi North Constituency Secretary, Abraham Ahiabu. The statement read:
At exactly 1245hrs this afternoon, upon intelligence from immigration officers deployed to the Hevi unapproved route, the monitoring team who were on their routine monitoring exercise in the Akatsi-North District intercepted 3 (three) booklets of dummy ballot papers containing thousand (1000) dummy ballots each at Hevi, an unapproved route in the Ave Havi enclave, en route to Vodome (Togo).
The statement continued:
The suspect, Hon. Abraham Ahiabu, who is the current NDC constituency secretary of the Akatsi-North Constituency, upon interrogation claimed he was on his way to Vodome in Togo to educate voters on how to vote using the dummy ballot papers. The suspect further claimed he had twenty thousand (20,000) dummy booklets in custody.
The suspect has since been handed over to the police for further investigations to verify the authenticity of the ballots.
Meanwhile, the decision to close the borders has sparked criticism from some stakeholders, including the Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr, private legal practitioner Martin Kpebu, and Franklin Cudjoe of IMANI Africa.
