Nairobi/Accra - Ghana's opposition candidate John Atta Mills has emerged the victor from an incredibly tight run-off presidential election, Ghana's electoral commission announced Saturday.

Atta Mills, who was running for president for the third time, took 50.23 per cent of the vote, ensuring he will be the man to lead Ghana into the oil era.

The race was decided in the remote farming constituency of Tain, which could not complete its vote in Sunday's presidential run-off election due to problems distributing the ballots.

Atta Mills, representing the National Democratic Congress (NDC), already had a 23,055-vote lead over his opponent, Nana Akufo-Addo of the ruling New Patriotic Party
(NPP) going into Friday's ballot in Tain.

Atta Mills, a 64-year-old law professor, took 19,566 votes in the special vote to 2,035 votes for his rival.

The president-elect, speaking before a crowd of supporters, promised to represent the whole nation and to lead Ghana forward. He is expected to be inaugurated on January 7.

Thousands of NDC supporters took to the streets to celebrate in a riot of noise and colour across the West African nation, local media reported.

The election was tainted by allegations of fraud from both sides. The NPP boycotted the Tain election after it failed to have the ballot postponed in a court case.

However, the commission said that despite the fraud allegations the result still stood.

"In the purely electoral matters the commission did not find the evidence provided to be sufficient to invalidate the result," Ghanaian radio station Joy FM quoted electoral commission head Kwadwo Afari-Gyan as saying.

The NPP claimed the results had been tampered with in the NDC stronghold of Volta, while the NDC made a similar claim about the Ashanti region.

Both parties also levelled accusations of harassment and intimidation against their supporters and polling agents.

However, Akufo-Addo said that he accepted the result of the election and congratulated Atta Mills on his victory.

The election was seen as key to African democracy, which sorely needs a boost after electoral chaos in Kenya and Zimbabwe and coups in Mauritania and Guinea last year.

Foreign election monitoring teams have said that both the first round and the run-off were credible.

Ghana, like Kenya before the post-election violence that followed the December 2007 presidential elections, is considered one of Africa's few truly functioning democracies.

The West African nation underwent coups in the 1970s and 1980s, but coup leader Jerry Rawlings organized elections and went on to win two terms.

He then handed over power to Kufuor, in 2000 when his party's candidate - Atta Mills in his first attempt at the presidency - lost.

Ghana has thus managed several peaceful handovers of power, but this time around the stakes were particularly high with Ghana about to enter the oil era.

Ghana's National Petroleum Corporation expects 120,000 barrels per day to come onstream in 2010, with that figure rising to 250,000 barrels a day within two years.

Ghana is the second-largest cocoa grower in the world after Ivory Coast and Africa's second-biggest gold producer after South Africa.

However, there is still widespread poverty among ordinary Ghanaians.

Atta Mills has promised to tackle this poverty and address rising food and fuel prices.

He will also be charged with maintaining strong economic growth, which has exceeded 6 per cent annually in recent years. (dpa)