© Afreepress (Lome, the 21st April 2015)-The Ghanian Head of state, John Dramani Mahama, who also doubles as chairperson of Ecowas heads of state authority and governments made an appeal to five presidential candidates to accept the outcome of ballot boxes because "there will be only one winner after the polls slated for the 25th of April this week".
He made the appeal after one-day visit in Togo on Monday evening. He also expressed hope that the presidential polls will be done in peaceful manner like in Nigeria. He, however, appealed to the electoral commission to find ways and means to resolve outstanding thorny issues including the mode of transmission of electoral results raised by the four opposition candidates.
He cited some of the concerns raised by all the presidential candidates.
"In this current visit few other concerns came out and this has to do with the ballot, with the transmission and declaration of results, the security of the whole electoral process and the voting by proxy by soldiers. As you are aware, security forces are supposed to vote earlier than everybody else because they have to perform on voting day. But all these concerns that were carried accross by all the stakeholders were discussed with the electoral commission. And the electoral commission gives us a quite satisfactory response to many of the concerns that were raised by the stakeholders" Ghanaian head of state said.
He, however, explained that there current concerns are due to the lack of communication between the electoral commission and the stakeholders.
" one of the issue we noticed is that there is communicating gap between the electoral commission and the stakeholders because we realised that some of them at that level do not understand what the electoral commission was doing in respect of some issues of the electoral process", he said.
President John Mahama recommended that the electoral commission should hold a major press briefing that will be attended by journalists and all political stakeholders in order to take all of them through the electoral process step by step before holding the polls on Saturday.
it will be recalled that Togolese authorities rescheduled the date polls after receommendations made by the Ghanaian head of state and Ecowas at the beginning of this month following concerns raised by opposition candidates. In all, over 100 ecowas electoral observers led by former Liberian Head of State, Amos Sawyer, to monitore and supervise the polls in Togo.
Blamé Ekoué
