NPP activist assaulted at Nkwanta-North Constituency

An attack on a New Patriotic Party (NPP) activist at a polling station at Tinjase, a border community in the Nkwanta-North Constituency, was the dark spot on what could have been a fairly peaceful general election.

The NPP activist, Ernest Lagsah, was allegedly attacked and beaten by some National Democratic Congress (NDC) activists who accused him of influencing voter decision of eligible voters who had queued to cast their votes.

Eyewitnesses said the incident occurred at about 10:30 a.m at the Tinjase D/A Primary B Polling Station.

The eyewitnesses said Mr Lagsah, who is former Assembly Member for the Tinjase Electoral Area, was lurking around the long queue of voters at the polling station and telling them to vote in a particular direction.

They added that after Mr Lagsah failed to pay heed to numerous cautions, a group believed to be NDC youth, manhandled him, leading to his hospitalization.

In an interview with Mr Lagsah at the Kitabini Clinic, where he was receiving treatment, the NPP activist said he had been targeted by the NDC group for deciding to support the NPP parliamentary candidate.

"I was in the queue to vote and I heard someone shouting my name and threatening to beat me; but before I could say anything, I started receiving slaps," he said.

Mr Lagsah accused the current Assembly Member of Tinjase Electoral Area, Konja Samuel, of leading the onslaught on him.

He said after receiving medical attention, he would write a formal statement at the police station and let the law take its course.

Explaining his side of the story, Mr Konja said as the Assembly Member of the area, he found the actions of Mr Lagsah as infringing on the rights of the eligible voters to take independent decision on who to vote for.

"I reported his action to the Police but they failed to act, so we had to stop him from going ahead with what he was doing," he said.

Meanwhile, the monitoring of the voting process in many polling stations showed that the exercise was largely smooth.

However, there were isolated cases of biometric verification devices (BVDs) failing to give some eligible voters the green light to vote.

The presiding officers at some of the polling stations said they were banking their hopes on the verification machine to instruct them to use facial recognition or the manual verification process to enable the affected persons vote.

"Until the machine tells us to proceed with facial recognition or manual verification, we cannot do anything about it," Josua Takpasun, the Presiding Officer at the GPRTU Office, Tinjase, said.

It was also observed that some of the polling stations had more than 500 voters contrary to the Electoral Commission's earlier assurance to keep the threshold below 500 voters.