By Kwasi Kpodo
ACCRA (Reuters) - Ghana's presidential rivals headed to a rural farming constituency on Wednesday, hoping to pick up votes ahead of a crucial ballot there on Friday which will decide one of Africa's closest ever leadership elections.
Tain constituency's 53,000 electors could not vote due to problems in last Sunday's run-off ballot, but will now choose who will lead the West African state, the world's No. 2 cocoa grower, for the next four years.
With votes counted from Ghana's 229 other constituencies, John Atta Mills of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has a wafer-thin lead with 50.13 per cent of votes.
Nana Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has 49.87 percent, and just 23,050 votes separate the two foreign-trained lawyers, both aged 64.
Akufo-Addo said he was leaving on Wednesday for Tain, where Mills finished narrowly ahead in the first round of voting on December 7. But he protested over irregularities and incidents of violence in last Sunday's ballot and said he may yet pull out.
"Whether or not we should go forward in Tain is a matter that we are going to consider," he told reporters in Accra of his planned meetings with party officials in the rural constituency located in Ghana's central Brong Ahafo region.
He alleged that NPP polling agents for 10 polling stations in the NDC's Volta Region stronghold were physically prevented from monitoring the vote by opponents on Sunday, while others were assaulted.
President John Kufuor, of the NPP, steps down on January 7 after serving the maximum two 4-year terms, and the late voting in Tain has squeezed the timetable for an orderly handover.
Observers from the European Union, the U.S.-based Carter Centre and the West African regional bloc ECOWAS said the run-off vote had been generally orderly and transparent.
Yet both parties have accused the other's supporters of irregularities and violence during the poll, a hard-fought battle to lead one of Africa's brightest investment hopes as it prepares to start producing crude oil offshore in late 2010.
OPPOSITION GAINS
Although Akufo-Addo led with a narrow majority in the first round of voting on December 7, Mills' NDC has made the most of the elections so far, overturning an NPP majority in parliament.
"In short, the January 2 vote is essentially cosmetic," Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, Africa analyst at risk consultancy Eurasia Group in New York, wrote in a report.
"The opposition NDC ... has essentially won the majority of presidential ballots cast during the run-off and Atta Mills will before the end of the week be declared president-elect," he said.
Many NDC supporters celebrated on Tuesday when Mills' lead was officially announced. But hundreds of NPP voters gathered at Akufo-Addo's Accra residence on Wednesday expressed anger over alleged election flaws and accosted journalists whom they accused of publishing election results prematurely.
Ghana, on Africa's Gulf of Guinea, has enjoyed growth and stability in recent years, becoming an investors' favourite. The country, also a gold producer, will start producing oil in 2010.
But with state debts mounting and economic growth slowing amid a global downturn, the new president will likely face high inflation and unemployment, and falling income from foreign aid and remittances from Ghanaians working overseas.
(Writing by Alistair Thomson; editing by Pascal Fletcher and Philippa Fletcher)
