By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 3, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
Enough already! And on the latter note, of course, I am referring to the group calling itself the Federation of Gender and Development Network International that has reportedly petitioned Ghana’s Parliament to punish Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, for allegedly claiming at an electioneering campaign rally that Electoral Commissioner Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei secured her chairpersonship job at the so-called Independent Electoral Commission (EC) by providing President John Dramani Mahama with sexual favors (See “Parliament Petitioned to Punish Agyapong” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/3/16).
I would rather have the Executive-Secretary of the group, Ms. Ajara Muhammed, call for Parliament to investigate the matter before presuming to unleash any disciplinary measures against the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Assin-Central, in the Central Region. In sum, have Ms. Muhammed and her associates pondered the credible possibility that, indeed, Ms. Osei may well have secured her job through the offer of sexual favors to Little Dramani?
The entire proposition is one that is inescapably curious because this is the same National Democratic Congress-dominated Parliament that has flatly refused to put solid evidence of President Mahama’s receipt of a $100,000-valued Ford Expedition payola on the floor of the august House for debate and the possible sanctioning of the Chief Resident of the Flagstaff House. In short, both the target of the FGDNI petition and the Ghanaian people at large have a far better chance of receiving a fair hearing and justice in a legitimately constituted court of law than in Ghana’s Parliament.
The plain-spoken Assin-Central MP is definitely not the worst elected representative to serve in our National Assembly. Ms. Muhammed and her group would also do better to investigate the felonious shenanigans over which Ms. Osei appears to be smugly presiding at the Electoral Commission, which could well plunge the country into a full-scale civil war, in the event of Election 2016 being brazenly rigged in favor of the man who appointed her to the job. I also don’t know what Ms. Muhammed means when she says that Mr. Agyapong’s “endless attacks on women” need to be stopped.
In the present instance, for example, Mr. Agyapong can only be aptly envisaged to be fiercely resisting the systematic scofflaw tactics being deviously employed by the EC operatives to criminally violate the inalienable right of Ghanaian citizens and voters to determine who their leaders and rulers ought to be. The lame invocation of one’s femininity as a strategic cover for such glaring political scam-artistry cannot cut it. Neither would any rascally attempt to abort the truth, or otherwise, of Mr. Agyapong’s allegations enable those hell-bent on preempting the realities of the issues at stake here get away with this broad-daylight scheme of highway robbery.
Ghanaians, as a people and a nation, have come too far to have our hard-earned right to democratic self-determination denied them by a few unconscionable megalomaniacs. I am also quite certain that Ms. Muhammed and her clearly well-meaning but woefully misguided associates would not want to see our hitherto peaceful nation, largely made peaceful by the patriotic acquiescence of the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party, plunged into a protracted and emotionally and psychologically irreparable civil war. It is within the preceding context in which the furor surrounding the calculated administrative recklessness of the so-called Independent Electoral Commission must be envisaged.
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