Former President John Dramani Mahama
Fellow Ghanaians, imagine you are relaxing in your compound then a stranger who looks like a criminal and a thief in your judgement as your first impression about her, suddenly arrives. And as you engage her in a conversation, your iPhone is visibly placed on the table you are sharing with this stranger, without nobody else with you.
Just the two of you. Then all of a sudden, amidst your chats, she asks you to look up to see a nice airplane passing by across the sky. When you raised your head up you did not see any airplane. And within that split second, you put down your gaze to find that your iPhone is nowhere to be found! Yet this stranger now puts her hands behind.
“Where is my iPhone?” you queried. “I did not take it.” replied the stranger. “But what is in your hand you are trying to hide from me behind you, and let me see?” you demanded. “It is not your iPhone, and I won’t show you the content of my hands if you want go to court,” the stranger said. And this is not a joke.
Reader, be as honest as Jesus the Christ, in such a situation, what would you have done? And unless you are a Mother Theresa or a Father Christmas who may choose to heed to this advice of this thief asking them to go to court. In fact, at that instance, you are likely to pick up a gun.
Fellow Ghanaians, what is the difference between the above scenario and what happened in the just ended 2020 election between the National Democratic Congress, NDC, and the Electoral Commission led by Jean Mensa? In this scenario, Jean Mensah is like the stranger.
In “Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope”, Mark Manson says of a German Scientist, Antonio Eagaz Moniz, who discovered lobotomy in 1935, which the Soviet Union later defined as “making an insane person an idiot”.
It is a surgery that involves drilling a mentally depressed or mad person’s skull through the nostril in order to slice and maim his frontal lobe so that he will never feel unhappy again nor bothered about potential fears.
Victims of this dangerous surgery, until it was abolished, were indifferent about dangers around them. I suspect Madam Jean Mensa is a victim of this frontal lobotomy, judging from her indifference to the peace of this country when she decided to declare the election 2020 results.
But you see, history is replete with instances like that where man’s inhumanity to another man is meted out to their follow men. Only that, the sedition, mayhem, and bloodletting that trailed them were bitter. I n April 1961, for example, the good people of Haiti went to the polls to elect their president as an exercise of democratic accountability and experimentation.
They however had the bitterest shock of their lives when they got to the polls: The Haitians found that despite the jostling of other presidential candidates in the buildup to that election, only one presidential candidate was on the ballot paper, and there was no either “Yes” or “No” to at least, give the people the choice to either allow the one candidate on the ballot paper to govern or not.
That only presidential candidate on the ballot paper was Papa Doc Duvalier. After realizing he was going to lose the election, Papa Doc Duvalier decided to put only himself on the ballot paper. How funny that election was? But their humour was shortly aborted when the man in question unleashed “violence and voodoo” on the people in order to hold on to power. Thousands were killed, the lucky ones exiled, and the unlucky ones maimed, according to a documentary: The Evolution of Evil Part 1.
Fellow Ghanaians, if president Akufo Addo had decided to put only himself on the ballot paper in the just-ended presidential polls, would it not have been more gratifying, more understandable, and more acceptable than what we witnessed in that electoral heist mistaken as a free, fair, and transparent election?
It is true that observer groups observed well but only at the polling stations where truly there was relative freer and fairer participation of all citizens who showed up for the polls. However, their jobs ended right there immediately results were declared.
That is, the observer groups did not follow to find out whether the results declared by Returning Officers were the results the Electoral Commissioner “certified” and presented to the rest of the world or not. And that’s where fairness, justice, transparency, were not being observed and served.
While political parties started jubilating on the face of the pink sheets issued to them, the EC in cahoots with the incumbent government decided to betray the declared results at the polling stations. And we all were witnesses to the visible unnecessary fidgeting of the EC when the time for declaration came. A clear admission of criminality and guilt, psychologically.
For the first time in the history of our election, an Electoral Commissioner could not calculate basic arithmetic in simple percentages. And she is said to be a lawyer! A “learned friend”. And such a person is our electoral commissioner in an enlightened country that is brimming with consummated intellectuals; accomplished professors, and globally recognized superior brains like Ghana? What is going on?
What is most unforgiving are the comments being made by some people I used to believe were statesmen and women by virtue of their status on the social ladder in our society, but who continue to appear to be more reckless to our national cohesion and development as people. So, in their statesmanship opinion, stealing the mandate of the people at the glare of everyone, in order to satisfy one’s narcissistic, psychopathic, paranoid, and megalomaniacal desire of presiding over their affairs, is all fine even if the people think otherwise. How unfortunate!
Apparently, Ghanaians did not buy into the mouthwatering flagship programs of “former” president Akufo Addo. That is quite shameful. His policies of one-village-one-dam, one-constituency-one-million dollars, one-ministry-four-deputy-ministers, among others, did not go down well with majority of the Ghanaian populace. And that reflected in the percentages of turnout of citizens during the polls which brought about the one-touch humiliating defeat of the incumbent government.
Without any fuss, Ghanaians had realized that the government of President Akufo-Addo was nothing more than a fraud that went gaga on a borrowing spree. The “Ghana Beyond Aid” mantra was just another empty slogan like our National creed of “Freedom and Justice” under president Akufo Addo.
Their so-called exiting of the International Monetary Fund, IMF, was only a premature move out of opportunistic desperation aimed at scoring very cheap political points with their opponents in the eye of the Ghanaian voter. But by the time former president Akufo first term of office came to an end, he had betrayed his own slogan of “Ghana Beyond Aid” by owing a whopping nineteen (19) countries many of which are our peers according to the World Bank. Such a cartoon leadership, the former president realized there was no way to escape being trashed in the dustbin of electoral defeat by Ghanaians so he resorted to the Joseph Stalinian principle of “those who vote do not decide who gets to lead, but those who count the votes decide everything.” Exactly what took place in this election.
I think Ghana’s subscription to democracy as a form of government aside other forms of government where the people decide who leads them through the ballot, is to eschew dictatorial tendency and to place the constitution above anybody’s parochial interest. And what that means is that persons who are merely office seekers, glory and publicity hunters, and psychopathic among us cannot get up one day to impose themselves over us simply because they think they must be ruling, and at all cost.
The danger is that, if persons with the above tendencies deem it fit to hijack our state’s institutions and obliterate them hiding behind fraudulent democratic processes to betray the national values and ideals of democratic principles, they become sadistic dictators addicted to violence in order to keep themselves afloat as leaders. Mostly, such leaders want to rule for life. Not because they really want to remain in power, but the fear of losing their lives when they ever step down.
You realized that “former” president Akufo Addo had to change the recognized venue for his investiture because he himself reckoned there were aggrieved citizens who did not accept him as the president-elect. Why didn’t he bother about the venue of his inauguration in the last investiture in 2017?
Because the citizens loved him, they chose him, they gave him the mandate. He was then safe. So, there was no need to hide. But this time around, even though he claimed to have been chosen again by the people, he did not see it wise to be sworn-in before the people but had to carefully, with stringent restriction, invited only his acolytes and party apparatchiks!
And indeed, the only way former president Akufo Addo could get sworn-in at the usual place at the Independence Square if he did not want to hide was to do what Papa Doc Duvalier did, what Mao Zedong did, what Mussolini did, what Saddam Hussein did, Kim Jong-il did, Joseph Stalin did, and all other known tyrants who wanted to lead their people at all cost. The reality is, you cannot work peacefully with people who do not like that you lead them.
Fellow Ghanaians, this is the gravity of what the incumbent government had done, and some responsible citizens actually think that it is okay to allow it to go uninterrogated, uninvestigated, and unpunished. Tyrannical leadership.
Another danger is that it is likely to legitimize and institutionalize electoral fraud in this country. Such that, in the nearest future anybody can decide to negotiate the system in such a blatant manner to be declared as a winner of election unjustly and “responsible” citizens would come out to advocate for its acceptance, and if there’s no a certain Mahama who has that large heart to tolerate it and decide to go to court, Ghana may mimic Côte d'Ivoire a decade ago between Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara.
Again, it is a dangerous precedent in the sense that, there is the potency of coup d’état, militarily. A certain J.J Rawlings would have sought to find justice for the rest of the citizenry whose mandate has been stolen, and another June 4th 1979 could have been successfully orchestrated; Another 31st December 1981 could have repeated itself, bringing our much-touted fourth republican democratic achievement to square-one. This is because the soldiers may not allow themselves to be imposed upon by an illegitimate commander-in-chief.
Especially, if the nepotism, corruption and general disregard of principles of good governance we witnessed under the last administration insist and persist. That is if the National Democratic Congress and other lovers and harbingers of democracy allow this electoral heist to stand.
Let Ghanaians be aware, that there is a tendency that a model of the 1979 coup d’état where junior officers toppled the government could repeat itself if Akufo Addo and his gigantic government are under the optical illusion that it has control over the generals at the top like it has over the EC and perhaps, the Judicial Arm of government.
The soldiers or militia who may carry out such a diabolical agenda of overthrowing our constitution would have found comfort and peace of mind in the flagrant disrespect of the constitution by those who stole the mandate of the people at the polls in the first instance. Mind you, what happened on December 9, 2020, was a “coup d’état” electorally. Violence was used to betray the constitution’s dictation of first-past-the-post by contestants in that election.
That is why every peace-loving Ghanaian must rise to this challenge of our democracy under siege! Indeed, “No Mahama, No Peace”.
Ideally, there are genuinely concerned citizens who are attempting to equate what happened in the 2012 election to that of the recent 2020 election, where rigging claims were made by the incumbent government at the time in opposition in respect of the victory of President Mahama in that election 2012. However, had it been in a serious jurisdiction elsewhere, that case would have been thrown out as of no legal effect!
The New Patriotic Party’s substantive case that took them to court in 2012 was that “the cumulative votes of presidential candidate Mahama surpassed that of his MPs’ cumulative votes by five hundred thousand (500,000).” And considering the margin of error with which president Mahama won that election in 2012, the NPP believed that those additional votes of 500,000, if had been dashed to him by the EC, was capable of making him the winner.
As a result, they went to court with forged duplicated serial numbers, and allegations of over-voting. But for more than eight months of Supreme Court hearing, their witnesses could not prove the over-voting; they could not prove duplication of serial numbers; they could not prove “irregularities” they claimed. In fact, we all were witnesses in this country when they invented that infamous phrase: “My Lord, you and I were not there”.
Fellow Ghanaians, if “you and I were not there” was the response during cross-examination of these witnesses, how did they know those things took place, if not a forged data?
That, a presidential candidate surpassing his MP in terms of votes has always been witnessed in all elections. It is the norm. For instance, in the just-ended election, both John Mahama and Akufo Addo variously, in several constituencies, had more votes than their respective parliamentary candidates. Take the famous Ayawuso West Wougon constituency for example candidate Mahama had 49,000 plus as against John Dumelo’s 47,000 plus, and same thing happened in Hohoe constituency.
Similarly, in Adenta constituency, Akufo Addo enjoyed more votes than Hon. Yaw Buabeng Asamoah and the same thing happened in many of the constituencies the NPP lost seats. So, if Akufo Addo had won this election legitimately, was he going to be sued because he had more votes than his MPs’ cumulative votes? And why on earth did the NPP take such an unfounded, groundless, and baseless case to the highest court of the land to be heard?
There were two major reasons why the NPP went to court in 2012, and claims of rigging the election by president Mahama and the EC led by Afari Gyan was not part of it. One, Akufo-Addo went to court, not for any correction of electoral fraud but to keep himself relevant as far as the next flagbearership race of the NPP for the 2016 general election was concerned.
Two, the NPP went to court in 2012 to keep the nation on tenterhooks in order to bring down investor confidence, both international and domestic, in order to cripple the Ghanaian economy so that Ghanaians could vote for the party in the next election. Judging from Akufo-Addo’s obsession with power and the desperation he displayed in the buildup to the 2020 election if he had won the 2012 election, there was no way he would have gone to court.
Fellow Ghanaians, now, compare what took place in the just ended 2020 election where simple percentages were misrepresented, and the substantive case that took the NPP to court in 2012. For the first time, we had an electoral commissioner who mistakenly declared election results and had to come back to make the correction the following day, yet she is the first to accuse others of incompetence.
This is despite what happened when she took over the leadership of the commission. From her bizarre adoption of new voters register at a cut-throat cost to the Ghanaian taxpayer; her unreasonable acceptance of birth cert to acquire Ghana Card but unacceptable to use that same birth cert to acquire Voter ID Card; her absurd refusal to hear other stakeholders’ concerns except the party that appointed her, and so on and so forth.
Such a highly questionable EC eventually presents election results that went beyond hundred percent in favour of the same party she had always agreed with, and responsible Ghanaians think that something like that must be allowed to go in the name of peace? Such a declaration of war on peace, justice, truth, and to a larger extent, the very commonsense of this country, must be accepted? Come on! what evil spirits have come over us? This is a betrayal of our national values, and persons culpable of that must not be allowed to lead us.
The Struggle (Jihadism) for our democracy is now!
Let’s save the future of our country from self-aggrandizing persons.
#NoMahamaNoPeace