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The decision by the executive membership of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) to issue a press statement roundly condemning the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Assin-Central, in the Central Region, for presuming to impugn the chastity and moral integrity of the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC), is one that points more to the gross incompetence of the GBA leadership than any egregious wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong.
(See “GBA Berates Ken Agyapong for Attacking EC Chair” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/29/30).
We must also quickly point out that the EC’s Chairperson is a professional legal practitioner and a member of the GBA. Mr. Agyapong, on the other hand, is a non-GBA-affiliated businessman.
The GBA’s note of condemnation also smacks of abject hypocrisy and double standards on the part of the association’s executive operatives who have sat mum and virtually AWOL while Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei imperiously defied the Supreme Court order for the EC to promptly clean up the country’s heavily compromised voters’ register in the lead-up to the 2016 general election.
And here must be promptly pointed out that Mrs. Osei has curiously and single-mindedly predicated her blatant refusal to obey the Supreme Court’s ruling by cavalierly and contemptuously claiming that the order is one that is elitist and deviously aimed at weeding out eligible Ghanaian voters who, for reasons best known to Mrs. Osei herself, may not be able to meet the new voters’ registration requirements enjoined by the Supreme Court in the wake of voting irregularities unearthed during the proceedings of the landmark Election 2012 Presidential Petition.
To be certain, the preceding anomaly is what the leadership of the Ghana Bar Association ought to have unreservedly condemned, and not the patently frivolous hip-shooting indisputably snide remarks by Mr. Agyapong to the effect that Mrs. Osei may have offered President Mahama some sexual favors in exchange for her job as Chairperson of the so-called Independent Electoral Commission.
By then, how does one square up the largely whimsical and capricious decision by Mrs. Osei to change the logo/coat-of-arms of a statutory institution like the Electoral Commission with the nose-thumbing public approval of President Mahama, without such significant statutory decision’s having been debated in Parliament by the elected representatives of the Ghanaian people?
This is what is called administrative impunity, and it has absolutely no place in a constitutional democracy like ours.
At any rate, the GBA leadership was fully aware of the fact of President Mahama’s flagrant violation of Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution, when the Chief Resident of the Flagstaff House transferred Mrs. Osei from the statutorily coordinate, or parallel, post of Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE). In retrospect, it is crystal clear that Mr. Mahama had something sinister up his sleeves when he effected such a patently and flagrantly unorthodox transfer.
This is what the GBA leadership ought to be discussing and roundly condemning, not the all-too-predictable and decidedly inconsequential tirade of a political loose cannon who is already notorious for his incessant purveyance of invariably tasteless pabulum paraded as comic relief, and thus one who has little credibility when it comes to making such snarky remarks on the private lives of his perceived enemies and political opponents.
And, by the way, whatever happened to the GBA’s suit against President Mahama’s allegedly arbitrary decision to deny a well-qualified jurist and a bona fide GBA member a seat on the august Supreme Court? Could have fooled me, GBA!