By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 6, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
He has been making the news headlines for all the wrong reasons. Well, actually the main reason is that he has unwisely ventured into the realm of a pollster. This is no anomaly because it is about Ghanaian politics, and in Ghana it is self-styled pollsters and prophets who call the shots. At least that is what such people consider themselves.
The Electoral Commission is only expected to deliver the results of what such critters claim to be the results of our elections. And to be certain, the stark fact of the matter is that the EC has been having a very hard time credibly delivering on what it alleges to know to do better than everyone else in the country. The EC made such a hatched job of calling the presidential election in 2012 that in the end, it was the Atuguba-presided panel of the Supreme Court of Ghana that converted itself into the Chief Returning Officer in the country.
Back then, as most of us vividly remember, the recently retired Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan could not even tell the Supreme Court and the nation at large what constituted either “over-voting” or “under-voting.” And yet this man, proudly armed with a doctorate from one of the major U.S. public universities, had been playing our substantive Electoral Commissioner for some two decades. And until his naked warty butts were so scandalously and shamefully exposed, the former University of Ghana political science lecturer had been sporting the magisterial accolade of Africa’s foremost Electoral Commissioner.
He had been jauntily crisscrossing the continent and offering what was erroneously deemed to be a first-rate professional and/or expert advice to his counterparts in countries like Tanzania and Nigeria. Now it risibly turns out that all along, Dr. Afari-Gyan scarcely knew anything worthwhile about what he had been lecturing and pontificating about to his professional associates and colleagues. But then again, why bother with such veritable quackery at all: after all, aren’t we in Africa where professional and academic titles often have absolutely nothing to do with the talents and capabilities of the personalities who routinely tend to bear the same?
Thus, for example, Ghana has a President John Dramani Mahama who was actually selected by the Supreme Court and constitutionally sworn in by the chief of the same. In other words, in Ghana, the Supreme Court is also effectively the electorate. Now, don’t ask me what then is the role of the ordinary citizen who has been registered to vote for a new president, and vice-president, every four years and, indeed, actually got to vote with the intention of doing precisely that in 2012, except that the deliberately bumbling Dr. Afari-Gyan decided that it would either be his judgment call or that of the National Democratic Congress-rigged Supreme Court. Either way, the ultimate outcome was bound to be the same.
Now, we also learn of somebody called Mr. Clement Bonney, a reportedly nondescript local thespian of some sort, who claims to be the prime beneficiary of policies conducive to the salutary development of the nation’s creative arts industry that were initiated and implemented by the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress government. For this reason, Mr. Bonney, who is also widely known as “Mr. Beautiful,” says that Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Ghana’s main opposition leader, can never be elected President.
There is a striking irony here, of course; for as highlighted above, Mr. John Dramani Mahma who in 2008 was elected Vice-President and arch-lieutenant to then-Candidate John Evans Atta-Mills, the man eventually declared President of Ghana back then, has never been popularly elected President of the Republic of Ghana, although he has been imperiously acting as such, and even has been sternly warning the very people who are alleged to have voted him into the reins of governance to cease and desist forthwith from criticizing his government, because other two of the three Fourth-Republican leaders who preceded him, namely, Messrs. Jerry John Rawlings and John Agyekum-Kufuor, none of the remaining 27 million, or so, Ghanaian citizens have ever acceded to the august presidency via the polling booth.
Least of all, Mr. Mahama wants Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the Oxbridge-schooled former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana and three-time Vice-Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), to steer as rhetorically far away from him and his government as the proverbial distance between Cape Town and Cairo. Now that is a really tall order, indeed. Or isn’t it?
Well, the fact of the matter is that Nana Akufo-Addo did not win the 2012 presidential election because technically speaking, as well as practically speaking, no presidential election was held in 2012. Or properly speaking, no credible results of the 2012 presidential elections were released to the media in that watershed political season. Mr. John Dumelo, the smooth-talking Trokosi Nationalist Actor, has recently been alleged to have imperiously declared that the Presidency and the Flagstaff House are decidedly no-go areas for Nana Akufo-Addo and the New Patriotic Party.
Needless to say, such reckless and irresponsible declarations presuppose that the leadership of Ghana’s largest and most progressive political party is poised to passively accepting another epic and deliberate electoral railroading lying supine. God save us from ourselves!
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs