The country just witnessed a political travesty the aftereffects of which would likely remain with its citizens for a long time to come. The man who is widely believed to have brazenly colluded with the chairman of the Electoral Commission to rig Election 2012 in his favor, has just gotten sworn in as the fourth president of the country’s Fourth Republic. At least three opposition political parties are crying foul; these parties are the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), and the National Democratic Party (NDP).
Japan was reported earlier on to have dispatched a “special envoy” to attend the President’s inaugural ceremonies. Outside the West, Japan is a country that understands democracy more than any other country on the planet. Japan is known to have a resident ambassador in the Ghanaian capital of Accra. That ought to tell the rest of Ghana what Japan thinks of this entire mess of a presidential inaugural circus. The “special envoy,” obviously, does not have the superlative diplomatic status of a resident ambassador.
Two things pique my attention here, namely, the fact that the entire world is symbolically congregated in Accra to bear witness to this “democratic travesty.” In the year 2000, a similar electoral fraud occurred right here in the United States, a nation that is widely considered to be the most technologically advanced democracy in the world. It took thirty (30) days for both the Federal Board of Elections and the Supreme Court to sort through the mess. In the end, though, truth, honesty and the sacred mandate of the people appeared to have taken the proverbial back bench. The United States’ Supreme Court would egregiously and flagitiously decide in favor of the loser, who would go on to serve two electoral terms in office.
In the American case, the august Supreme Court was largely split along partisan lines in favor of Mr. George W. Bush, whose father had occupied the presidency for one term not quite a while before and may significantly have helped in packing the highest court of the land with Republican-oriented judicial partisans. You see, here in the United States, people still talk about the rule and significant role of justice in our ordinary day-to-day existence. And for the most part, justice works reasonably well, even in the rare cases where the filthy rich and/or politically powerful are involved, even if it comes in the form of a proverbial slap on the wrist.
At the level of the highest court of the land, it well appears that “We,” the people, have long reasonably well understood the fact that justice has no substantive relationship with the highly venerated justices of the Supreme Court. Justice is decidedly understood to be political. And so even long before the verdict in the Gore v. Bush case came down, the people had aptly decided that it was going to heavily fall in favor of the real loser, the now-former President George W. Bush.
Today, not very many Americans remember these two Southern and Southwestern gentlemen very well, except when it comes to talking tax cuts for the rich and greedy bunch, when the name of its veritable architect and executioner, President George W. Bush, comes up now and again. For former Vice-President Albert Gore, Jr., being flagrantly cheated by the Supreme Court of the most powerful country on Earth could not have come at a better moment. His deep-seated interested and great environmental activism would eventually win him the globally coveted Nobel Peace Prize. No doubt, some significant somebody had been sedulously watching the 2000 U.S. presidential travesty from Sweden and Norway with acute displeasure.
The “Chief Justice,” Mr. William Rehnquist, a much-touted “Southern Gentleman” and choirmaster of the Election 2000 travesty would not know much peace thereafter. His political and professional greed would see him expiring on the proverbial bench under the most inglorious of circumstances, in the full glare of television cameras. The aged and visibly sick man had adamantly refused to honorably retire from his juicy post. It appears that he might have completely come to identify his very visceral existence as a human animal with this make-believe act of playing God. In the end, though, Divine Providence was forced to give this wretched pretender the heave-ho.
Mr. Rehnquist was not known to be very kind and/or charitable to the socially underprivileged and economically and culturally marginalized. But this aspect of the man is prime grist for a good narrative at another time and place.
Anyway, the other aspect of Ghana’s fraudulent presidential inauguration of Mr. John Dramani Mahama which piques my interest regards the fact that it was Chief Justice Georgina T. Wood, the first female to hold the job, who swore him in. You see, the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, the ruling party, have absolutely no affection for both Chief Justice Wood and the very court of which she is the sworn head. The key NDC operatives have routinely flouted verdicts and decisions handed down by the Court in much the same way that several decades ago, a woman in her menstrual period was routinely shunted to the side of social and cultural affairs.
Several days from today (January 7, 2013), Chief Justice Wood will be presiding over the NPP suit challenging the legitimacy of President Mahama. It would be quite fascinating to witness how Mrs. Wood and her equally erudite associates marry ceremonial travesty – or protocol – with the kind of professional clinicality demanded of people legally empowered to play executioners of justice in the Democratic Republic of Ghana.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 7, 2013
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