By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 9, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
You know Vice-President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur was lying through his teeth, literally, when he recently told an audience of Ghanaian citizens resident in the Benin capital of Cotonou, that the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was poised to supervising “free and transparent elections” on November 7. We know this because at the same venue, in the wake of the investiture of Mr. Patrice Talon as the new President of Benin, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the NDC’s General-Secretary, jauntily asserted that complaints by some key operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) that the current National Voters’ Register (NVR) lacked credibility was untenable because “it was members of the same party that proposed the idea of a biometric voters’ register, which was then agreed upon by all representatives of the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC).”
The foregoing assertion is farcically disingenuous because as we vividly recall, it was President John Dramani Mahama who personally and publicly instructed the then-Electoral Commissioner, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, to ignore the IPAC-approved Biometric Voter Verification protocol and allow voters whose identities could not be verified and/or validated at a remarkable number of polling stations and centers, most notably in the northern part of the country, to go right ahead and vote, in spite of the fact that their identities could not be verified. We must also quickly point out that the mere fact of some key New Patriotic Party operatives having caused the introduction of a Biometric National Voters’ Registration System into the country, did not in any way absolve Dr. Afari-Gyan from facilely kowtowing to President Mahama’s patently flagrant, to speak much less about the downright criminal, decision to flout a pre-established voting protocol collectively approved by IPAC.
The fact of the matter is that Election 2012 was criminally rigged in favor of the ruling party, a heinous misdeed for which the executive operatives of the New Patriotic Party can in no way be held responsible, as Mr. Asiedu-Nketia seems to be doing here. To be certain, among the first comments made by the man popularly known as “General Mosquito,” in the raucous aftermath of Election 2012, was that the NPP operatives had been forced to concede defeat by their total lack of vigilance. We must also quickly underscore the imperative need for the NPP leaders to flatly reject the newly EC-proposed voter-verification system which entails a couple of witnesses verbally testifying at any polling station that they know a prospective voter whose identity cannot be readily established by the BVR machine. What if the person being testified for is a mischief-making poseur who never registered and is simply being trotted in from Togo, for instance, at the eleventh hour by an NDC cabal desperate to ensure its paymasters win the election at all costs?
The leaders of the opposition political parties, notably the New Patriotic Party, should fiercely resist any dastardly attempts to register Ghanaians resident abroad who are not in the employ/-ment of any of our diplomatic missions or were not sponsored by the government abroad and cannot establish the fact that they have been actively engaged in socioeconomic activities of remarkable benefit to the country’s economy since the last election season. Travelling to Cotonou in order to bribe and cajole Ghanaian-born citizens resident in Benin who may not have lived up to their citizenship responsibilities for at least the past four years, ought to be among the focal priorities of the Electoral Commission during the period of the limited voters’ registration exercise.
We must also note that the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party played absolutely no part in the morally and socio-politically regressive decision by Dr. Afari-Gyan, the former Chairman of the EC, to hire the shady Israeli ICT firm called STL to either tabulate or transmit election results from the various regions of the country during the 2012 general election. If, indeed the National Democratic Congress has a Green Book comprehensively detailing both completed and ongoing development projects initiated by President Mahama and his team of cabinet and non-cabinet appointees, let flamboyant party machine operatives like General Mosquito make such touted achievements PDF-available on the Internet.
And to those diehard and pathological cynics, largely operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress, accusing the NPP operatives of scheming to “Patapaaistically” clinch victory at Election 2016, we only backhandedly riposte that what is good for the NDC, election-wise, is also good for the NPP.
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