Ghana Votes , Mourns And Argues: NDC Polls Turn Rough, Dzokoto Dies, Goldbod Faces Its Critics.

Feature Article Ghana Votes , Mourns And Argues: NDC Polls Turn Rough, Dzokoto Dies, Goldbod Faces Its Critics.

MON, 26 OCT 2026

It has been one of those weeks when Ghana's news refuses to sit politely in separate boxes. A ruling party counts ballots while some of its members throw punches. A beloved actor collapses live on radio. Seven fishermen drift for days on an engine that quit. A court convicts a former agency boss and sends him home with a fine. Here is the full picture, Ghana first.

GHANA

The NDC goes to the grassroots, and the grassroots push back

About 15,000 aspirants were expected to contest across 276 constituencies on October 24 and 25, with Ketu South voting a day early. In Ashanti alone, 2,724 aspirants chased positions across 47 constituencies. In the Eastern Region, officials reported peaceful polls in 31 of 33 constituencies, with Akwapim South and Akwatia voting on Sunday.

Calm in most places, then, but not everywhere. Reports spoke of tension in Kade over alleged tampering with the voters' album, and a protest at Adansi Fomena over an aspirant's alleged disqualification. The worst was Odododiodio in Accra, where sorting and counting were suspended after violence broke out right after voting ended. The re-elected chairman, Paul Oblie Laryea, called the clashes unfortunate and described his constituency as a "boxing zone", which is a strange thing to say with a straight face about your own party's election. He promised more peace education.

Koku Anyidoho, a former deputy general secretary, conceded the polls were peaceful overall but asked why his "beloved NDC" was having so much trouble at constituency level. The bigger fight is coming. Regional elections follow on November 14 and 15, and the National Congress is set for December 19. Chairman Johnson Asiedu Nketiah did not pick forms to defend his seat, and Nii Lante Vanderpuye is running for national chairman. If a party cannot count a constituency vote without a fight, delegates will be asking what the national contest will look like.

Kwame Dzokoto (1975–2026)
Seth Kwame Dzokoto, 51, collapsed during a live panel discussion on Owass FM in Tarkwa on October 22 and was pronounced dead on arrival. Ghana knew him as Judge Koboo in Efiewura and as the face of Edziban. He was also a politician who contested Tarkwa-Nsuaem for the NDC. His sister Gloria said the family had no warning: he had driven himself from Accra to Tarkwa the night before. The NDC observed a minute of silence for him, noting his law degree and a master's in defence and international politics from the Command and Staff College.

Grief has a way of getting noisy. Headlines already show an NDC figure blaming party neglect and a showbiz personality linking his death to his eating habits. A cause of death has not been officially stated. Anyone speculating this early is arguing from nothing.

Seven men, one canoe, eleven days
The canoe Second Chance left Sekondi Fishing Harbour on October 9 for waters off Axim and never returned. When the crew finally got a phone call out, one of them said the outboard motor had failed, tides had carried them more than 120 nautical miles offshore, and they were boiling seawater to drink. On October 21 the Western Regional Minister said contact had been established and the canoe was inside Togolese waters. The Ghana Navy, the Marine Police and Togo's navy were brought into the effort of getting the men back.

The owner reported them missing nine days after departure. Nine days. Nobody expects a canoe to carry a satellite beacon, but the Fisheries Ministry itself has promised better emergency communication and coordinated search systems. Seven men survived this one on luck and fish.

GoldBod, galamsey, and a number that cuts both ways

Here is the case for the Gold Board. It bought up to 54 tonnes from small-scale miners in the first half of 2026, after a record 104 tonnes of small-scale output in 2025, with nearly $11 billion in foreign exchange earned from the sector last year. The CEO, Sammy Gyamfi, says decades of weak state support for formalisation helped create the galamsey crisis, and that GoldBod does not buy directly from miners, only from licensed aggregators.

Here is the case against. The NPP's National Organiser asked, "If GoldBod is not buying galamsey gold, then who is?" The Minority Leader argues the system draws no regulatory distinction between legally mined gold and galamsey gold. And Gyamfi himself has admitted that some of the 700-plus licensed buyers may be sourcing from illegal miners despite the rules.

Both sides are working from the same inconvenient fact. Record gold flows and record environmental damage are happening at the same time. One analysis notes that illegal mining has degraded over 80 percent of the country's major water bodies. A blockchain track-and-trace system was promised, and until it delivers, "formalisation" will be judged by the rivers, not the press releases.

Former NDA boss convicted, then fined
The High Court in Tamale convicted former Northern Development Authority CEO Sumaila Abdul-Rahman and three others on seven of eleven counts over procurement contracts under the IPEP programme. No prison followed. The court weighed the convicts' advanced ages and found the state suffered no financial loss, and imposed fines instead. Reports put it at GH¢84,000 each or four years in jail. The prosecution's own account alleged a contract inflated from GH¢5.7 million to GH¢10.4 million after a forged signature.

A conviction is a conviction, and the Special Prosecutor will call it a win. But ask a nurse in Tamale whether a fine in the tens of thousands settles a ten-million-cedi question, and you will get a debate. Defence lawyers, naturally, call avoiding prison a victory.

The tourism authority's family quarrel

The Ghana Tourism Authority's top two are fighting in public. Deputy CEO Gilbert Abeiku Aggrey, better known as Abeiku Santana, petitioned the Minister over what he calls a recurring struggle to get access to CEO Maame Efua Houadjeto. She replied to the Board Chair that she runs an open-door policy and is "surprised and disappointed", then proposed five measures to fix communication.

The timing matters. Two weeks earlier, the GTA and its CEO had denied collecting money for World Cup visa opportunities, after the Minority raised questions about names submitted to foreign missions. A deputy who says he cannot reach his boss, in an institution already answering questions about trust, will not stay a private matter for long.

Rapperholic comes home again
Sarkodie took Rapperholic XXIV back to Kumasi's Baba Yara Stadium on Saturday night. It was the second consecutive edition there after last year's historic homecoming. Last year the rain nearly ruined the night, and fans stayed until the show ran into Sunday morning. His brand now stretches from Kumasi to London's Royal Albert Hall in March. Whether the concert became the "centre of Ghana" he promised depends on who you ask in the Garden City this morning.

Cannabis, at home and abroad
Customs at Torve near Akatsi seized 560.4 kilogrammes of suspected cannabis, valued at GH¢11.2 million, from a vehicle with falsified plates on October 15. The driver ran. Overseas, a British gang's Thailand-to-Birmingham run ended in jail. They had 460 kilograms in 22 suitcases, and a British-Ghanaian courier, 21-year-old Carsten Kyei, was among those convicted. In the end, Apple AirTags in eight of the bags helped investigators find the drugs.

Technical university strike
Lecturers at technical universities have been on an indefinite strike since October 1 over unpaid post-retirement contracts and conditions of service. TUTAG says it will not accept verbal assurances and wants a written, signed roadmap. There is movement: its executive will hold an Extraordinary Congress on Monday, October 26 to consider proposals from the vice-chancellors. Students on those campuses have lost almost a month.

ECG: read the notices
The lights have been going off by schedule, not only by fault. Recent notices covered Accra West from October 18 to 23, 9am to 5pm, Tema on October 20 and Fosu and surrounding Central Region towns on October 21. Unplanned faults hit Ogbojo and Community 8 on October 17. Check ECG's notices for your area before you plan your week.

Ghana-Canada, and a BRICS shadow
Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa visits Ottawa on October 26 for talks with Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand, and will meet the development Secretary of State. Two weeks ago he announced Cabinet's decision that Ghana will formally apply to join BRICS, a move one outlet noted could test ties with Washington. He has also been warning embassies over poor visa services after touring about 20 missions. A Ghana that courts Ottawa, Delhi and Brasília in the same fortnight is making a bet on keeping every door open. Whether that is smart diversification or a juggling act is worth arguing about.

AFRICA

Mahama in Ethiopia
President Mahama landed in Gondar on October 23 at Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's invitation and joined him to commission the Megech Irrigation Project, a dam that stores 185 million cubic metres of water and will irrigate 17,000 hectares. He then moved on to Bahir Dar to chair the 12th Tana High-Level Forum on Security in Africa. A president chairing a security forum while soldiers fight militants in the next story down is not a coincidence of scheduling.

North-east Nigeria
Militants overran an army base in Guzamala, Borno, killing at least 10 soldiers according to military sources, and attacks have intensified in recent weeks. Other sources put the toll higher, reporting 15 soldiers and five civilian JTF members killed, with several soldiers missing. The military says air strikes between October 10 and 18 killed 103 ISWAP fighters, though rights monitors have not confirmed the count. Seventeen years in, the numbers still depend on who is holding the microphone.

Sudan: a war now fought with drones
The UN says drone strikes killed at least 306 people in the first three weeks of October, with 139 dead in a repeat strike on a truck in West Kordofan on October 18. Both the army and the RSF are blamed. An attack on a market in Abyei killed more than 150 people according to local reports; Khartoum denied army involvement and South Sudan summoned Sudan's ambassador. A Swiss official summed it up bluntly: the war has become a drone war that kills mostly civilians.

THE WORLD

Brazil decides
Brazilians voted Sunday in a tight runoff between President Lula and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio led the first round 47.03% to 45.16%, and polls show the two practically tied. No result was available as of this writing.

Israel votes Tuesday, and the West Bank is shut

After two soldiers were killed near Hebron, Netanyahu ordered a "full lockdown" of the West Bank, and the defence minister confirmed about 2,000 people were forcibly displaced. All crossings will be closed on election day, October 27. More than 7.3 million Israelis are eligible to vote at over 12,000 polling stations. Critics say a lockdown timed to a vote is no coincidence. Supporters call it basic security. Either way, the election opens with a territory sealed off.

US and Iran
President Trump says he has "a decision to make" on Iran, has said he will not strike before the November 3 midterms, and has sent a third carrier group toward the Gulf. Meanwhile one analysis claims Netanyahu's agreement not to strike Iran before the election was the price of Trump's endorsement, which is one analyst's reading, not a confirmed fact. Oil markets are watching a strait where, according to Iran's Guards, vessels have been hit using routes Tehran rejects, a claim Trump disputes.

Europe's streets
France saw at least 400,000 protesters on Saturday, almost 1,000 detentions, and 70,000 officers deployed. Demonstrations spread to Italy, Spain, Portugal and Albania. In Italy, police briefly detained 371 people in eight cities. The anger is about school funding and the cost of housing, which is to say the anger is about young people who cannot see their future.

Serie A
A weekend of goals, and not many of them defended. Atalanta and Frosinone drew 4-4, with Frosinone scoring inside the first minute and equalising in the 82nd. Napoli and Roma also drew 3-3 after Roma came back from 2-0 down and equalised in the 89th minute, then Napoli finished with a red card in the 90th. Inter beat Fiorentina 2-1. Juventus at Lecce and Milan at Udinese were still to play at the time of writing.

The sky
On the same weekend, the Hunter's Moon passed close to Saturn, with the moon and planet sharing the same patch of sky on October 23 and 24. For anyone in Ghana wanting a look, the moon turns full at 4:12am UK time on October 26, which is the same clock Ghana keeps.

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. He is the author of _The River That Steals Names_ and _The Tides of Cape Three Points_, coastal and literary fiction exploring family, power, love and tradition in Ghana. Founder of Brownsy Silva Company, he . More
Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

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