By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Unlike Nana Akufo-Addo, I am not the least bit disappointed that our decidedly lame and NDC-scoffed Supreme Court would affirm the fraudulent declaration of Mr. John Dramani Mahama as winner of the 2012 election (See "Akufo-Addo: 'I Disagree with SC's Verdict but I Accept'" Ghanaweb.com 8/29/13).
I am not disappointed because I am also not the least bit surprised. For going into the Election 2012 Petition, I emphatically stated that unless the panel of jurists adjudicating the petition were drawned from outside Ghana, I did not see much by way of a favorable ruling for those with the most forensically sustainable evidence. And so in quite a practical sense, I have been vindicated in my prediction.
What is a bit disturbing, however, is the fact that it took the Atuguba-presided panel the longest eight months on the Ghanaian political calendar to reach it wholly predictable decision. Fortunately, the whole of Africa and the rest of the world has witnessed the patent travesty that has been made to pass for the highest and finest quality of Ghanaian judicial culture. And it is the latter state of affairs that acutely embarrasses me, rather than the very tasteless decision itself.
I am also gobsmacked that Nana Akufo-Addo, a former Attorney-General and one widely considered to be among the foremost ranks of the leading trial lawyers in Ghana, would express sadness and disappointment with the Atuguba ruling. Needless to say, the effective nullification of the judiciary by the Rawlings-led P/NDC was firmly established with the June 30, 1982 savage abduction and summary execution of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges.
And so, short of a radical revolution of an apocalyptic tenor, there is not much by way of clinical justice that can be expected of the Supreme Court, or any other highly placed judicial bench in the country, for that matter. But whether democracy-loving Ghanaians are willing to be politically and economically enslaved by the key operatives of the P/NDC, as they have been for the past three decades, remains to be seen.
If I were Nana Akufo-Addo, I would neither be so sure nor even proud of having set any remarkable precedence in the way that elections are conducted in Ghana. If anything at all, the Mahama posse has, once again, emphatically proven that one can actually massively rig the polls, with the criminal complicity of Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the superannuated Electoral Commissioner, and "Supremely" get away with the same.
I, however, wholeheartedly agree with Ghana's former Foreign Minister that it is time to move on. But whether, indeed, "all of us [can] come together and work to find solutions" for the myriads of largely deliberately created systemic problems plaguing the country, is another question altogether.
As usual, I am not holding my breath; for I neither think, for even one second, nor candidly believe, that it is either feasible or even desirable, in view of what we have already known and experienced these past protracted three decades, that Ghana's two major radically divergent ideological camps can collaborate on a salutary national development agenda.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
August 29, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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