VOICES | Sankofaonline Special Feature Election Grief in Ghana: The Families Behind the Statistics

Far from being activists, agitators, or armed, they were ordinary individuals: students on their way home, traders finishing their day, sons delivering food to polling agents, fathers working to keep their families safe during the outbreak of chaos, and others just there, waiting for the ballots to be tallied

Their deaths defined what elections cost when impunity wins and truth is buried.

As Ghana reckons with the newly submitted report on electoral violence—covering incidents from 2020 and 2024—Sankofaonline revisits the human toll. The names. The lives. The families whose grief demands accountability.

In Kasoa’s Awutu Senya East, the family of 17-year-old Kwaku Mensah still wears black. He was shot by stray bullets near a polling station in 2024 while buying water for his mother, who had queued to vote. His mother speaks little now. But she told us, “He died doing something for me. No one has come to ask who he was.”

In Ablekuma Central, 2020, a young teacher, Emilia B., collapsed after a security officer fired warning shots amid ballot tensions. She was caught in the panic, trampled, and declared dead on arrival at the local clinic. Her sister still keeps her teacher training certificate framed beside a candle. “She had plans. Now we just have silence.”

In Techiman South, a father of four, Yakubu A., was shot while confronting what he believed was ballot box tampering. His widow is raising the children alone. Their youngest, age three, still asks when Baba is coming home.

These are not statistics. These are citizens whose lives were severed by democratic dysfunction. Their stories were whispered, politicized, debated, denied. But they were never resolved.

President Mahama’s receipt of the IGP’s report offers a chance to reopen these cases—not just for legal closure, but for moral justice. The families want truth. Reparations. And above all, remembrance.

Ghana must not turn away.

Their grief is part of our democracy’s ledger. Their absence is a measure of our national integrity. Their stories belong not in forgotten files—but in the public square, where we confront what violence steals, and what justice must restore.

Sankofaonline will continue to profile these families, publish their testimonies, and push for visibility. To speak their names is to honor their lives. To seek justice is to strengthen our future.