election 2020

Christian Kwabena Andrew is the founder and 2020 flagbearer of the Ghana Union Movement (GUM) party.

His party, GUM, which he formed in 2019 has a vision to revive Kwame Nkrumah’s developmental agenda for Ghana.

Andrew was born in Duase Kanyasi in the Ashanti Region, and is 55 years old. He attended Ejisu Abankra elementary school, Ejisuman Senior Secondary School and Ejisu Atebubu Training College. He is a former teacher and former District Chief Officer.  Andrew is currently a businessman, entrepreneur, farmer, and pastor and founder of the  Life Assembly Worship Center. He is married to Princess Nyarko Andrew with three children.

Andrew is one of the 12 presidential candidates, out of the 17 who filed nominations, who passed the qualification requirement by the Electoral Commission of Ghana. The rest are the two major political parties’ presidential candidates, Akufo-Addo and Mahama, nine other candidates of minority parties and an independent candidate.

Dubawa has partnered with the largest domestic election observation network in Ghana, Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO), to fight election-related misinformation and disinformation during Ghana’s December 7 elections.

The partnership, which also includes GhanaFact, another fact-checking organisation in the country, is in line with the parties’ commitment to stemming all election-related misinformation that can threaten the nation’s peaceful climate. 

CODEO, who will have a deployment of observers across the country, will provide on-site verified information to the two fact-checking organisations, whose responsibility will be to subsequently prove or disprove all election-day and election-related information. 

CODEO is an independent and nonpartisan network of civil society groups, faith-based organisations, and professional bodies who observe Ghanaian elections. The CSO has observed every election in Ghana since it was established in the year 2000.  

As Dubawa is charged with keenly executing this mandate, an intensive two-day fact-checking training, supported by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, was organised for 10 leading Ghanaian bloggers last week.

The training, which was facilitated by the Dubawa team (Dapo Olorunyomi, Adedeji Adekunle and Kemi Busari) as well as legal and media expert, Zakaria Tanko, centered mainly on identifying the need to combat misinformation with basic tools for fighting misinformation online and propagating the legal ramifications of spreading misinformation to the electorate.

The training ended with a joint agreement by Dubawa and the bloggers to promote  accountability, transparency and accuracy in election-related stories.

In the agreement, the bloggers, recognising misinformation and disinformation as a threat to the December 7 elections, committed to do the following as a social service in support of Ghana’s democracy:

1. Help maintain an election devoid of the corruption of information, otherwise called “fake news”.
2. Collaborate with Dubawa to identify viral misinformation and disinformation in the media space and on social media ahead of the December 7 elections.
3. Sharing verified or fact-checked information by Dubawa on our various platforms including social media before, during, and after the elections.

Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is the President of the Republic of Ghana, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces, and the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for the December 2020 elections.

Akufo-Addo is the son of Edward and Adeline Akufo-Addo, and is recognised to be of political descent, where three close relatives of his were members of the Big Six – also referred to as the Founding fathers of Ghana. They were: his father, Edward Akufo-Addo, who was the third Chief Justice of Ghana and the President of the Republic (1969-1972); his uncle, William Ofori-Atta; and his granduncle, J.B Danquah. 

Akufo-Addo’s public political involvements unfolded in his early thirties as he was engaged in some political activism while serving in some associations. 

He was part of those who spearheaded the pro-democracy movement in Ghana through the People’s Movement for Freedom and Justice (PMFJ), where he served as General-Secretary. 

He is also noted to have established grassroots branches of the Organising Committee of the Danquah-Busia Memorial Club all over the country in 1991, while he served as the Club’s chairman. Akufo-Addo then became the first national organiser of the NPP in 1992 and, later in the same year, he became the campaign manager for Prof. Albert Adu Boahen, who was NPP’s first presidential candidate. Akufo-Addo is also acknowledged to have set up and financed The Statesman newspaper, which is noted to be the unofficial newspaper of the NPP, in 1992.

His political activism continued in 1995 when he led the ‘Kume Preko’ demonstrations by the Alliance For Change (AFC). 

Akufo-Addo contested for parliamentary elections and was elected three times between 1996 and 2008, as Member of Parliament for the Abuakwa South constituency in the Eastern Region. 

Then from 2001 to 2007, Akufo-Addo had some ministerial appointments, serving under the Kufour government as Cabinet Minister, where he was first an Attorney-General and Minister for Justice for two years, and then a Foreign Minister for five years.

Akufo-Addo’s bid for presidency started in October 1998 when he competed for the presidential candidacy of the NPP and lost to John Agyekum Kufuor, who later became president. 

In July 2007, Akufo-Addo won against 16 others for the position of presidential candidate for the NPP for the 2008 December elections; however, he lost the election that year. He contested again for the 2012 national elections and conceded defeat yet again.  

In March 2014, Akufo-Addo announced his decision to run as NPP presidential candidate again for the third time and he was nominated against 7 competitors. Subsequently, in the 2016 elections, he won the presidential elections and was sworn in as President of Ghana on 7 January 2017. 

Besides being a politician, Akufo-Addo is a trained lawyer and economist. He studied law in the UK and was called to the English Bar (Middle Temple) in July 1971 and to the Ghana bar in July 1975. He also studied Economics at the University of Ghana and obtained BSc in Economics in 1967.

Before then, Akufo-Addo received his primary education in two schools: at the Government Boys School in Adabraka, and later at the Rowe Road School, which is currently called Kinbu, in Central Accra. He later went to the UK to study for his O-Level and A-Level examinations at Lancing College, Sussex and returned to Ghana in 1962 to teach at Accra Academy Secondary School.

Akufo-Addo was born on 29 March 1944 in Swalaba. He comes from Akropong-Akuapem and Kyebi in the Eastern Region and was raised in the Ga-Maami and Nima areas in the Greater Accra Region. 

He has four children and is married to Rebecca Akufo-Addo, who is the daughter of former Speaker of Parliament of the Third Republic, Jacob Hackenburg Griffiths-Randolph.