John Mahama has been sworn in for a second term as Ghana’s president at a ceremony in the capital Accra, with around 20 African leaders in attendance.

Mahama won 56 percent of the vote in the nation’s presidential election on December 9, defeating ruling party candidate and Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia, who secured 41 percent.

Mahama takes over from outgoing President Nana Akufo-Addo, who served two terms in power.

“Today should mark the opportunity to reset our country,” the 66-year-old new president, wearing the West African country’s national dress, told a jubilant crowd decked in the green, red, black and white hues of his National Democratic Congress (NDC) party on Tuesday.

Energy radiated from Accra’s Black Star Square, as a sea of elate faces waved Ghanaian and NDC flags, chanted and broke into spontaneous dance to the beat of drums and the blaring honk of vuvuzelas.

Among those present were Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Burkina Faso’s leader Ibrahim Traore, Kenyan President William Ruto, President Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Gabon’s Brice Oligui Nguema.

Mahama, 66, was sworn in alongside Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, the first woman to become vice president in Ghana.

Mahama’s return to the presidency ends eight years in power for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) under President Nana Akufo-Addo, whose last term was marked by Ghana’s worst economic turmoil in years, a bailout by the International Monetary Fund, and a debt default.

Mahama, who led Ghana from 2012 to early 2017, had previously failed twice to win back the presidency. But in December’s election, he managed to tap into expectations of change among Ghanaians.

On Black Star Square, supporters of the elected leader exuded joy, hope and optimism.

“I’ve never been so proud to be Ghanaian,” Akosua Nyarko, 28, a teacher from the southern city of Cape Coast, told the AFP news agency. “The energy here is amazing … This is the dawn of a new era!”

Mohammed Abubakar, a 50-year-old farmer from Tamale in northern Ghana, said he was confident Mahama would prioritise rural development.

“Coming here to Accra for this historic event is a dream come true,” the farmer said, adding that Mahama’s “leadership gives me hope that my children will have a better future”.

A writer and devotee of Afrobeat music, Mahama wrote in his memoir – My First Coup d’Etat, And Other True Stories from the Lost Decades of Africa – that he was changed by his boyhood experiences during a 1966 military coup.

He was born in northern Ghana as a child of privilege, his house being the only one in the village with a diesel generator.

His father, who served as a junior government minister, was briefly detained and interrogated by the 1966 coup leaders but later released unharmed.

Mahama was also a member of parliament and chairman of the West Africa Caucus at the Pan-African Parliament in Pretoria.

With a history of political stability, Ghana’s two main parties, the ruling NPP and the NDC, have alternated in power equally since the return to multi-party democracy in 1992.

The country of 33 million people is Africa’s top gold exporter and the world’s second-largest cocoa producer.