Ablekuma North violence: Tame electoral vigilantism - Experts advocate
Four professionals with expertise in security, governance and peacebuilding have said that the pockets of violent incidents that marred the limited rerun of the Ablekuma North parliamentary election exposed the deep fractures in Ghana’s democratic fabric.
They have consequently called for urgent reforms to prevent the resurgence of vigilantism in the country’s political fabric.
“The lesson is unmistakable: democracy must be defended, not merely through voting, but through the integrity of the institutions and processes that uphold it.
Ahead of the upcoming by-election in the Akwatia Constituency — likely to become a litmus test of Ghana’s resolve — concrete steps must be taken to restore public confidence and protect the sanctity of the vote,” a security expert, Col Festus Aboagye (retd), stated.
The Project Director of Democracy Project, Dr John Osae-Kwapong, said it was time for key institutions which had the responsibility for sustaining the peace and security of the country as well as for ensuring the integrity of elections to develop a comprehensive anti-electoral violence plan before the “isolated” incidents get out of hand.
“Perhaps, in future, the parties, working with the EC (Electoral Commission) through the Inter Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) platform, can forge consensus around protocols for collation centres to reduce tensions and the prospect of chaos,” he stated.
A former United Nations Senior Governance Advisor, Prof. Baffour Agyeman-Duah, suggested that the EC, political parties and civil society groups should come together and envision a system that would minimise the presence of political activists at polling stations.
“In the same way, we should design the electoral process in such a way that there would not be so much interference during elections,” he said.
For the Regional Coordinator of Research and Capacity Building of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), Dr Festus Kofi Aubyn, “this partial parliamentary rerun highlights the urgent need for electoral reforms.
Transparent decision-making, strong accountability for political violence, robust security response, and intensified civic engagement are essential to safeguard Ghana’s democracy and prevent a resurgence of political vigilantism”.
For his part, a peace advocate, Dr Charles Ohene-Amoh, said: “Addressing these challenges through enhanced security protocols and continued community engagement is essential for safeguarding the integrity and credibility of future elections.”
Previous experiences
The Ablekuma North incident added up to previous violent elections in Akwatia, Chereponi, Talensi and Ayawaso West Wuogon.
The partial rerun happened seven months after the 2024 parliamentary elections amidst collation challenges as a result of missing collation sheets whicj led to themeant the constituency failing to to produce a winner in the parliamentary race.
Security
Col Aboagye said: “What was meant to resolve a previous electoral impasse instead descended into systematic violence, revealing the persistence of electoral vigilantism and weaknesses in the country’s governance systems”.
He explained that the violence was neither isolated nor spontaneous but stemmed from a complex interplay of political desperation, weak institutional checks and socio-economic tensions, particularly the monetisation of politics and youth unemployment which fed political vigilantism.
“The prohibitive cost of political campaigns and the centralisation of power in the executive presidency intensify the incentives to deploy violence as a means of electoral advantage,” he said.
Failure
The retired military stalwart said both the EC and the Ghana Police Service failed in their mandates.
“The EC’s controversial rerun decision — expanding the number of polling stations without clear justification — coupled with inadequate security arrangements and poor communication, significantly undermined public confidence.
“The Police Service, despite prior warnings of potential violence, did not act decisively — reports of passive officers and fake security personnel infiltrating the process point to serious planning and intelligence lapses,” he noted.
Collectively, Col Aboagye said those failures illustrated the institutionalisation of electoral violence, the erosion of democratic norms and the emergence of state capture dynamics in Ghanaian politics.
“The use of violence as a deliberate electoral tactic and the inability of institutions to counter it reflect an environment where democratic backsliding is not just possible but well underway,” he said.
Reforms
Col Aboagye called for the strengthening of security protocols for elections, including vetting and deploying competent and professional personnel; enhancing the independence, integrity and transparency of the EC and also establishing legal accountability for political parties and actors who would incite or support violence.
He said Ghana stood at a democratic crossroads, and without urgent and coordinated reforms, the Ablekuma North partial rerun risked setting a dangerous precedent which could deepen the normalisation of violence as a tool for electoral disruption and threaten the country’s hard-won democratic progress.
Dr Osae-Kwapong said the EC’s decision to re-run the election in 19 polling stations, which was met with considerable objection from the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), offered an example of how administrative decisions, within the confines of the law, could be deployed to resolve election disputes.
However, Dr Osae-Kwapong explained that while the EC’s administrative remedy was commendable, “the way the decision was arrived at and communicated revived conversations about trust and confidence in the institution”.
He said for the EC to move from requesting for adequate security to a need to rerun 19 polling stations opened it up for criticism.
The respected civil society stakeholder said even as the EC shouldered much of the blame for the Ablekuma North impasse, the contributing role played by the two main political parties – NPP and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) - could not be overlooked.
Ballots
Contributing to the discussion, another security expert, Dr Emmanuel Sowatey, said the electoral violence that was witnessed underscored the fact that issues of peaceful elections or peace more broadly did not follow a linear progression.
“We did not only see ballots but also physical blows,” he said, adding that fights, guns and ballots should not go together at polling stations.
He said a peaceful election was “never guaranteed without conscious and sustained efforts involving multiple players working together and having the resilience of an ecosystem.”
Dr Sowatey said if any state failed to prioritise peace or did not appreciate its complexity, but trivialised the efforts needed to sustain and consolidate peace, violence might overwhelm it like a flush flood.
Dr Sowatey said Ghana needed to prioritise peace in all its multifaceted, multilayered and multidimensional forms, and should not be complacent in thinking it was too peaceful.
WANEP
Dr Aubyn said if such assaults as witnessed at the partial rerun were repeated in the next bye election, it could promote a cycle of political violence and the resurgence of political vigilantism.
“More ominously, the forceful entry of party-affiliated thugs into some polling stations and the inability of the police to restrain them underscores the glaring weaknesses in election security planning,” he stated.
Dr Aubyn said the EC’s decision to run the elections in 19 instead of three polling stations without clear communication and consensus had deepened perceptions of institutional opacity, which could further exacerbate mistrust.
Peace
Dr Ohene-Amoh added that violence during the Ablekuma North partial parliamentary rerun underscored critical lessons for future election planning, calling for post-incident investigations and appropriate sanctions to understand the root causes of the violence and served as deterrents against future occurrences.
Governance expert
Prof. Agyeman-Duah expressed concern about the persistence of violence during elections, and called for an end to such behaviour that dented the country’s democracy.
“We must not accept violence as part of our electoral democracy,” he said.
He also expressed concern about the inactions of the police in dealing with such situations during elections.
“It is worrisome that the police always seem powerless at political events like that because in previous electoral conflicts, we saw the same thing.
The police either stayed back a bit or they didn't assert themselves to control tension, and they allowed those things to go on," he said.
The governance expert said the ineffectiveness of the police in maintaining security at electoral events could be the result of the politicisation of the security sector.
He called for an electoral process designed in ways that there could be no interference during elections.
Mussa Dankwah
The Head of Research at Global InfoAnalytics, Mussa Dankwa, for his part, said the NDC and the NPP did not have ample time to campaign as the timing between the EC’s announcement of the need to re-conduct a new poll and the elections were very short.
He said, for the NDC, however, the dramatic shift in the mood of the country with regard to recent polls appeared to have given it further advantage.
Mr Dankwa said the announcement by the NPP that it was not going to take part in the election, though its candidate and other party functionaries were seen campaigning in the last days after the court dismissed an application of the party to have the EC stopped from going ahead with the election, did not help the party.
“The lack of unity of purpose is likely to have sent a wrong signal to the rank and file of the party that there was no need to competitively compete for the seat, a decision which is likely to have impacted the turnout in the election,” he said.
Lessons going forward
He urged political parties to put in extra effort in understanding polling data so that they could gauge the sentiments of the voters and to better understand how to craft their campaign messages.
NDC
The NDC's National Deputy Director of Elections and IT, Sofo Tanko Rashid Computer, expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the partial rerun.
Security
On the issue of security, he called on the security agencies to up their game by providing adequate security at the polling stations in future elections, saying that any party official or activist at the polling station must be subjected to thorough search to ensure that there was no weapon on them.
The NPP officials who were reached did not respond to calls from this paper.
