By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I am neither a lawyer nor a constitutional lawyer, for that matter, but I have been compelled to write about the subject several times during the past year (hardly to my liking), particularly vis-à-vis Ghana’s parliamentary election. The issue that has preoccupied me for the past year regards Ghanaian-born residents abroad who decided to heed earnest calls by the country’s leaders during the latter’s travels abroad to return home and lend a helping hand to Ghana’s development at all levels of endeavor, including their active engagement and participation in national politics, only to be mischievously and rudely told, after all, that not only are they not qualified for national service, but also that they never possessed a bona fide Ghanaian identity, to begin with.
The latest casualty of such flagrant mischief is Mr. Adamu Dramani, winner of last December’s parliamentary election in the Bawku-Central Constituency of the Upper-East region of Ghana. It appears that following the clearly intelligent and constructive path of those of us who decided, long ago, not to have any share, or part, of the bloody Rawlings-Tsikata “revolution,” the substantive Bawku-Central Member of Parliament decided to acquire a second citizenship in the Western nation in which he has been a longtime resident, without giving up his congenital Ghanaian citizenship or birthright, contrary to what the presiding judge of an Accra high court would have the rest of us believe.
What is more, the Fourth-Republican Constitution of Ghana allows for dual nationality, otherwise the half-Scottish Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings could never have qualified to dominate our country’s political landscape for twenty extortionate years. The implicit legality of dual citizenship in Ghana is also underscored by the unreserved acceptance of the Ghanaian citizenship of only one of the parents of a presidential candidate, in order to be certified as fully qualified for the same. And here must be promptly recalled the fact that nearly all our previous constitutions – 1956, 1969, 1979 – recognize only the full-citizenship of a candidate’s parents and, even in some cases, all of one’s four grandparents, in order to qualify for the highest office of the land. Of course, in the case of Mr. Adamu Dramani, we are only dealing with the more localized level of parliamentary politics.
Predictably, in the wake of his disqualification by a Ghanaian high court (his citizenship had been impugned by a local herdsman, we are told), the shameless leadership of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) exploded with jubilation at the chance of recapturing the seat fairly and squarely lost to Mr. Dramani by Mr. Mahama Ayariga, the presidential press secretary to Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills. And here a few things are worth noting, both for the sake of fair-play and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of the evidently disqualified parliamentary incumbent. We must also observe that as of this writing (7/19/09), Mr. Dramani was reported to have launched a “stay of execution” appeal against the rather bizarre verdict of the high court, as he rightly ought to.
For our part, it clearly appears as if the voters of the Bawku-Central Constituency exercised the sort of legitimate electoral judgment that only the primary residents of any constituency would be expected to, which is that they voted, first and foremost, in their own best interests. And their best interests, in this particular instance, necessitated the effective removal of Mr. Mahama Ayariga. The latter’s recently reported attempt to unconscionably exploit the farmers of his constituency at the taxpayer’s expense may well eloquently elucidate one factor for Mr. Ayariga’s losing of the Election 2008 parliamentary vote. In the latter incident, the Atta-Mills presidential press secretary, among other NDC stalwarts, reportedly purchased heavily subsidized tractors from Ghana’s agriculture ministry and hired them out to local farmers at approximately twice the going rate, which caused some of these farmers to, literally, call for his head. And so it is not quite clear what he means, when Mr. Ayariga jauntily asserts that “It would be difficult for me not to contest” (See “Ayariga Relishes Return to Parliament” (Modernghana.com 7/16/09).
Mr. Ayariga also, reportedly, claimed that based on documentary evidence, he was fully convinced that the man who routed him at the polls last December “is not a Ghanaian” citizen. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of the people who voted for Mr. Dramani have a different opinion, and it is the opinion of the latter than unimpeachably counts, not that of a far-removed high court judge sitting in Accra and pontificating like a British colonial administrator.
Then also, Mr. Ayariga may need more than just “documentary evidence” to stake his claim against his victorious opponent. For instance, could the defeated NDC-MP make a forensically sustainable claim that, indeed, Mr. Adama Dramani has no familial/kinship roots in his parliamentary locality and thus the incumbent representative is a total stranger? Then also, there is the practically legitimate question of the language in which both candidates prosecuted their political campaigns. For instance, did Mr. Dramani speak in a language with a rhetoric that may unmistakably be taken for one who is alien to the affairs of the Bawku-Central Constutuency?
What makes the Dramani Affair volatile and the Accra high court judge who rendered such erratic verdict unwise inheres in the fact that all this comes in the wake of protracted and still raging inter-ethnic violence in the region. And what is even more damning is the fact that the man eagerly attempting to reclaim his legitimately lost parliamentary seat does not appear to have significantly worked towards a diffusion of tension in Bawku and its environs.
Ultimately, though, the name of Mahama Ayariga does not sound any more indigenous than that of Adamu Dramani. And what is more, there is absolutely no evidence, thus far, to indicate that Mr. Dramani’s is a recently adopted name.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008) and a Board Member of the Danquah Institute (DI), the Accra-based democracy-oriented think-tank.
E-mail: [email protected].