Opposition Leader to Be Ghana's President

Atta Mills Wins in W. African Nation's Peaceful Balloting

ACCRA, Ghana, Jan. 3 -- Opposition leader John Atta Mills was declared Ghana's next president Saturday after a peaceful ballot that secured the West African nation's place as a beacon of democracy on a volatile continent.

Ghana is now one of the few African countries to successfully transfer power twice from one legitimately elected leader to another. It made the transition to a mature democracy after experiencing years of coups in the 1970s and 1980s, and survived the closest presidential vote in its history with Atta Mills's win.

In this election and the one in 2000, opposition leaders won the presidency.

Opposition supporters thronged the streets after the announcement, and jubilant drivers honked horns across the capital, Accra. Atta Mills told a crowd outside his campaign headquarters that "the time has come to work together to build a better Ghana."

"I assure Ghanaians that I will be president for all," he declared.

Atta Mills, who on Wednesday will take charge of the world's No. 2 cocoa producer and the latest African country to discover oil, will have to contend with the effects of a global economic downturn. The poor in Ghana already complain that wealth is not trickling down, and Atta Mills has accused the government of corruption.

After a Dec. 7 election proved indecisive, Atta Mills won Sunday's second round of balloting with 50.23 percent of the vote to 49.77 percent for ruling party candidate Nana Akufo-Addo, according to the country's Electoral Commission.

The historic ballot marked the third time that Atta Mills ran for president and was so close, authorities had to rerun it Friday in one district that had run short of ballots.

Akufo-Addo conceded defeat and congratulated his rival, and the ruling party, to promote national unity, ended court filings questioning some districts' voting results.

John-Peter Pham, an Africa expert at James Madison University in Virginia, said the election was "the first case in Africa I can think of where a country has seen two successive transfers of power from democratically elected incumbents to democratically elected successors."

That the transfers were between opposing governing powers "is an important indicator of the vibrancy of a country's democracy and the maturity of its political institutions," Pham added.

Some analysts had feared violence, noting that Kenya was also a model of stability in Africa until a similarly tight 2007 election unleashed weeks of tribal bloodshed.

Pham said former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan -- who helped broker peace in Kenya last year -- flew home to his native Ghana on New Year's Day and worked behind the scenes to calm tensions. President John Kufuor also called on both sides to accept the results.

Atta Mills, 64, spent much of his career teaching at the University of Ghana and served as vice president under former coup leader Jerry Rawlings, who stepped down in 2001.

Atta Mills earned a doctorate from London's School of Oriental and African Studies before becoming a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University.