Finally, the Afari-Gyan-led Ghana Electoral Commission (EC) has entered its response and counter-petition at the Registry of the Supreme Court of Ghana seeking to defend its December 9, 2012 fraudulent declaration of President John Dramani Mahama as the winner of Election 2012 (See “NPP Petition: EC Files Defense; Says Case Has No Merit” GNA/Ghanaweb.com 1/9/13).
Predictably, Dr. Afari-Gyan is seeking to have the New Patriotic Party’s contestation of the EC’s declaration of Mr. Mahama as winner of Election 2012 summarily dismissed for what the EC chairman dubiously claims to be the woeful lack of merit to it. The former University of Ghana political scientist has also vehemently challenged his accusers to prove their charges of electoral fraud on a constituency-by-constituency, or case-by-case, basis.
The foregoing gauntlet is also all-too-predictable, and it is quite certain that the petitioners and their associates had ample time between researching the basis for their legal suit and the filing of the same at the Office of the Registrar in the Supreme Court Building on December 28, 2012. What is rather paradoxical here, though, is the fact that the Electoral Commissioner should be calling for the summary dismissal of the Akufo-Addo suit at the same time that Dr. Afari-Gyan is calling on the key operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party to clinically and microscopically present their forensic evidence.
What fascinates me, in particular, however, is the EC’s epic concession, or rather curious acknowledgment, that, indeed, it publicly put out into the global public domain clearly concocted figures vis-à-vis the number of registered Ghanaian voters on its officially compiled voters’ register at the same time that Dr. Afari-Gyan magisterially declared Mr. Mahama to have handily won the December 2012 presidential election. My interest here primarily regards the fact of whether the Electoral Commission would have promptly revised, or corrected, the figures had the EC not been vehemently challenged by the key operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party. And, also, the fact of when the EC came to the realization that, indeed, it had “inadvertently” put out the wrong figures vis-à-vis the total number of registered voters into the global public domain. And then, also, how long it took the EC to correct those falsified figures.
In other words, if Dr. Afari-Gyan and his staff of the Electoral Commission could so easily miss the exact and accurate number of registered Ghanaian voters in the voters’ register, which the EC itself compiled, by the whopping figure of 127, 097 (One-Hundred-And-Twenty-Seven-Thousand-And-Ninety-Seven) voters/votes, what assurance does the voting public and the citizenry at large, really, have that the Electoral Commissioner was telling them the truth, and was not grossly mistaken, or was even being deliberately mendacious, when Dr. Afari-Gyan, a diehard CPP/NDC hack, looked straight into media cameras and microphones and exuberantly declared President Mahama to be the unimpeachable winner of Election 2012?
Needless to say, if Nana Akufo-Addo and his crackerjack team of legal mavens can effectively and forensically impugn the credibility of Dr. Afari-Gyan and his staff of putatively knavish electoral commissioners and their minions before the Chief Justice and her associates on the Supreme Court of Ghana, I have absolutely no doubt about the New Patriotic Party’s having then fought a worthwhile fight. In other words, my contention here is that if the NPP can even marginally prove its case by massively pockmarking, or poking holes into the credibility of the EC, the key collusive partner of the ruling National Democratic Congress, vis-à-vis the criminal rigging of Election 2012 then, literally speaking, the NDC is decidedly a “toast,” as New Yorkers are wont to say.
The foregoing notwithstanding, I find it very significant to let my readers fully appreciate the fact that while, indeed, I have on occasion caustically taken the proverbial battle to individual Ghanaian leaders, including both Messrs. Afari-Gyan and Mahama, of course, as well as Nana Akufo-Addo and former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, when I have fully felt the imperative necessity of the same, in reality, my ultimate focus has invariably and indubitably been to ensure that democracy, as practiced in Fourth-Republican Ghana, meets the highest standards of its kind anywhere around the globe. For, as most of my avid readers must have garnered by now, I just happen not to believe in the repulsively cynical notion of there being in existence a breed of democratic culture that is relativistically or uniquely African, or only conducive to the recent political and historical conditions of the African continent. The African is as fully human and as cognitively sound and capable as any of his/her species around the globe.
In sum, I just happen to believe that it is far past time that Ghana break out of the generally primitivistic and unpardonably regressive political cocoon that has become the apparent lot or destiny of most countries on the primeval continent. Simply put, “Blackness” and/or “Africanity” ought not to be the determinant factor in the way that Ghanaians, both as a people and as a nation, identify and relate to the rest of our neighbors and fellow humans on the continent. We need to forge closer bonds with other African nations based significantly on a mutuality of progressive agendas intensely focused on accelerated socioeconomic, technological and cultural development, rather than the sheer accident of geographical location and/or commonality of misery, largely in the form of recent sociopolitical oppression and repression by Western Europeans and Arabs, for the most part.
The patently benighted alliance of “democratic dictators,” such as doggedly pursued by Benin Republic’s President Yayi Boni and Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, in our time, ought to be fiercely opposed and unreservedly discouraged. In other words, what Ghanaians themselves think, in terms of whether Election 2012 was conducted fairly and transparently, ought to be far more significant than what non-Ghanaians think, even presidents and potentates on the African continent and beyond.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 9, 2013
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