By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
It was only to be expected that having so cheaply and gratuitously gotten the Supreme Court of Ghana to literally put its own foot in its mouth, as it were, the General-Secretary of the so-called People's National Convention (PNC) would also be presumptuously predicting what Mr. Bernard Mornah fervidly hopes to be virtually tantamount to a judicial nullification, in American civil-rights parlance (See "Akufo-Addo's Petition Will Amount to Nothing - Mornah" Radioxyzonline.com/Ghanaweb.com 5/1/13).
Of course, I am hereby alluding to the suicidal quashing of Constitutional Instrument 74 (or CI-74) by a section of the membership of the Wood Supreme Court on grounds of its being unconstitutional when, as one legal expert and a university professor, here in the United States, aptly posited, CI-74 has absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to do with the country's 1992 Republican Constitution, but everything internally, professionally, integrally and procedurally to do with the legal right of the Judicial Council to establish modalities for the objective prosecution of momentous cases, such as the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) petition impugning the integrity and validity of the declaration of President John Dramani Mahama as the decisive winner of Election 2012.
I must also take this glancing, or tangential, opportunity to caution the Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party against making ill-advised and preemptive pledges vis-a-vis the outcome of the ongoing hearings by the Atuguba Court. We also hope that the key operatives of the International Criminal Court are paying sedulous attention to the proceedings. Likewise, we see the same gladhands that deviously orchestrated the so-called Manhyia Peace Accord - and the so-called Peace Council - emerging, once more, out of the proverbial wood-work.
What is also fascinating about the judicial precedents cited by Mr. Mornah in his rather brassy craving for a judicial nullification of the Akufo-Addo Revolution, is the fact that the young man may be darn too wet-eared to fully appreciate the fiery temperament and racing pulse of the majority of the Ghanaian voters who saw at least 4 million of their votes illegally and criminally awarded the wrong candidate in Election 2012, even as I write.
Well, the 2000 landmark case of Al Gore v. George W. Bush does not the least bit apply to the present Ghanaian case because in the latter instance, electoral victory is solely determined by the "Popular Vote." In the case of the United States, the classical example cited by Mr. Mornah, presidential election victory is primarily determined by the number of delegates won by a concerned presidential candidate in the Electoral College. American Democracy, in essence, is a veritable plutocracy, a democracy of the filthy rich and powerful, and not one primarily determined by the proverbial average citizen.
At any rate, let's not waste any breath discussing Nigeria's 2008 Supreme Court verdict in Umaru Yar'Adua v. Muhammadu Buhari because, truth be told, Nigerian democracy is no seminal template worthy of Ghana's emulation. To be certain, quite the reverse is traditionally the case. In other words, Ghanaian democracy is in its temporal midday, whereas Nigerian democracy is still lurking somewhere in the proverbial darkest hour before the dawn.
The Kenyan judicial travesty that the international community witnessed recently, is highly unlikely to be reprised in Ghana for reasons detailed previously elsewhere, namely, that of temporal strictures and also the fact that the margin of victory between Messrs. Kenyatta and Odinga was almost 10-percentage points, statistically enough to be declared a landslide. Then also, Nana Akufo-Addo's sterling legal expertise and the caliber of the personnel at work on his petition filing readily paled the Odinga situation into Stygian insignificance.
As I observed earlier on, any Supreme Court decision short of the outright declaration of Nana Akufo-Addo as the clear and decisive winner of Election 2012, may well pave the way for either a Kigali and/or an Abidjan dilemma. We may not, in any way, be quite as cowardly as Mr. Mornah seems to so cavalierly suppose.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
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