An independent parliamentary candidate in the just-ended Kuwamu by-election in the Ashanti Region has said the polls were not free and fair.

Mr Kwaku Duah said there was massive vote-buying perpetrated by some elements of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) during the Tuesday, May 23, 2023 exercise.

“This is not a somewhat fairly organised election,” he said, adding that: “This has set the country's democracy backwards”. 

He noted that he failed to garner the votes he had in the 2020 parliamentary elections in the by-elections due to vote-buying.

“If the elections were fairly organized, a different story would have been told today,” he claimed.

He said: “You go to a polling station and all you see is an NPP element with their SUVs parked at the polling station with bags hanging around their waist offering goodies to the electorate at the polling station.”

This, according to him, was widespread during the by-election.  

Mr Duah further accused the EC of tilting the processes of the by-election in favour of the governing NPP.

According to him, he was the first to have filed his papers and when he pointed it out, he was told by the Electoral Commission (EC) that in by-elections it is not first come, first served.

“So they managed to include another independent candidate who used my emblem and this was the same emblem I used in the 2020 elections,” he bemoaned.

“I quickly had to petition the EC boss in Accra for the right things to be done,” he noted