By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament's notice to Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan that it might sanction the Electoral Commission for failing to promptly audit its 2012 accounts is rather amusing (See "Afari-Gyan Faces Sanction for Unaudited Accounts" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/19/14). Maybe somebody ought to remind PAC Chairman Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, that our august Supreme Court, acting through the Atuguba panel, has effectively placed the Electoral Commissioner and the Commission that he heads over and above the law. To be certain, Dr. Afari-Gyan is the law.
Not having its 2012 operating account audited means that the Commission also has yet to audit its 2013 operating account. In any enlightened democracy, Dr. Afari-Gyan would be tendering his resignation for exhibiting such gross administrative incompetence. But in Ghana, of course, our national anthem is incompetence itself. And so chances are that nothing would happen to Dr. Afari-Gyan. In fact, we got a gustatory hint of this when Chairman Agyeman-Manu was reported to have almost apologetically counseled the EC capo to light into the hide of some Brong-Ahafo local operatives who had allegedly caused such auditing delay.
For me, though, the most interesting aspect of this petty banter, for such is what Dr. Afari-Gyan's encounter with the PAC members veritably was, regarded that aspect where the EC chief and his two deputies reportedly insisted that not a single pesewa had been misappropriated, in spite of the flagrant fact that the the commissioners have yet to submit an audited expenditure record for the 2012 and 2013 fiscal years. I hope in appearing before the PAC, the former University of Ghana political scientist and his minions had not been sworn to own up to anything but the truth, "so help them, God."
I also don't know what enormous job it is that the EC capos had to perform that prevented them from auditing and filing the commission's audited expenditures for two straight - or consecutive - years. Except, of course, that mischievous creation of some 35, or so, additional electoral districts with only four months to Election 2012. In the latter instance, also, Dr. Afari-Gyan, even as former President John Agyekum-Kufuor bitterly complained, decided to effectively take the law into his own hands by literally flouting the same. Statutory regulations, as the proverbial Gentle Giant aptly pointed out at the time, clearly stipulated that such electoral redistricting ought to be undertaken with at least 24 months to go before the closest election date.
We all know that the PAC chairman was merely jiving when he threatened to withold funding from Dr. "My-Friends-Made-Me-Smoke" Afari-Gyan. I mean, how can anybody entrust the destiny of a great country like Ghana to a man who claims to be so facile with his personal morals and his very life as to let just about any friend and/or acquaintance he ever made or encountered so readily cajole him into consenting to the potentially fatal smoking out of his lungs? I suppose it was also his friends who bullied Dr. Afari-Gyan into learning how to drink. And then to think of the same person having the nerve to look Ghanaians straight in the eye and declaring that absolutely nobody could bribe him to cynically massage polling figures.
Come on, Dr. "Akpeteshie"-Gyan, but you just finished massaging the 2012 electoral figures in favor of... you know who I'm talking about, of course! Anyway, I could almost see Chairman Agyeman-Manu scratching his head in my mind's-eye, even as he pretended to have the balls to punish Dr. "Friends-Made-Me-Smoke" for playing dumb over what constitutes over-voting and under-voting. I could also hear Chairman Agyeman-Manu's heart drop off his chest and into the pit of you know where... as it suddenly dawned on him that he had just lost his next parliamentary election.
___________________________________________________________
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Feb. 20, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
###