After Afari Gyan….

He has exited after over 20 years of service to this nation as the Chairman of the Electoral Commission. The President of the Republic has honoured him for his immense contributions towards the democratic process of this nation since the Fourth Republic. For good or ill, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan smiled to receive his honour after 20 years of being the man around the organization that conducted five national elections.

Within the period, quite a number of reforms in the electoral process took place, from partial use of Voter ID cards for the voters, through to the use of Biometric Voter Devices. The reforms notwithstanding, Dr. Afari-Gyan was seriously bruised when the New Patriotic Party (NPP) went to the highest Court of the land to challenge the outcome of the Presidential elections in December of 2012. Exposures of wrong doing by EC officials in our electoral process were so obvious that they could sway an election results in favour of a particular candidate or political party. For how long such irregularities had occurred in our electoral system and which political groupings had benefitted from those aberrations would best be known to the EC and its outgone Chairman.

Some months back, I had given an anecdote of a man who was suspected to have murdered another man and was hauled before the law courts. The suspect was very wealthy and influential in the society and he managed to secure the services of one of the best legal brains to represent him in court. The counsel succeeded in winning the case for his client. Thereafter, the accused purchased a very expensive cloth, a fat cow (not the Baba Jamal type, eei where is he? ) and added huge sums of money to go and say a big thank you to the counsel.

The counsel received him and his entourage nicely and after the client had explained his mission, the counsel refused the gifts but told the client that for every sin a man commits on earth, he would surely have his rewards here on earth and that he only used the law to defend him and that the rest was up to him, the client and his creator. Afari-Gyan had received a national award for his stewardship at the Electoral Commission but as to whether everything he did at the Commission was in the best interest of the nation is left to himself and his creator.

Afari-Gyan is gone with both his strengths and weaknesses; his successor has been chosen by the President but the controversies that surround the selection of the new EC Chair is what I want to wade into from the point of ignorance and hoping to be educated by those who know and understand the laws of the land.

The Fourth Republican Constitution created three bodies and insulated them from any external controls and directions. The processes of removal of the Chair persons of those bodies and their deputies are also explicitly stated in the Constitution. The three bodies are the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), and the Electoral Commission.

In respect of CHRAJ,  Article 225 of the Constitution says this for the Commission and the Commissioner,  'Except as provided by this constitution or by any other law not inconsistent with this Constitution, the Commission and the Commissioners shall, in the performance of their functions, not be subject to the direction or control of any person or authority'. Same is said in respect of the NCCE in article 234 to insulate the Commissioner and the Commissioners from external direction and control.

The Constitution gives similar protection for the Commissioner and Commissioners of the Electoral Commission as well in article 46 of the Constitution. The ordinary definition of direct in the Advanced Learners' Dictionary says' to show or tell someone how to get somewhere'. Control is also defined as 'to make people behave in the way you want them to behave'. The three institutions have been given adequate protection by the Constitution against any form of blatant or veiled directions or controls. In addition to that, the Constitution further states the grounds on which a Commissioner or Commissioners would be remove from office.

The MacMillan English Dictionary defines remove as 'the process of making someone leave a job or position of power. The Advanced Learners' Dictionary and the Websters' English Dictionary also define remove as 'to take something or somebody away from one place to another, or dismiss somebody from a post, to dismiss from office or to transfer to another post' respectively.

The removal of any of the Commissioners in the three institutions mentioned above goes through the same process as the removal of a Judge of the Court of Appeal, which is also stated in article 146 clauses 3 and 4. Going by the above provisions in the Constitution, is there not a breach by the President in removing Mrs. Charlotte Osei from office and offering her another position without going through the removal process as stated by the Constitution? Nobody has so far challenged the qualifications of Mrs Charlotte Osei as the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, but does her removal fall in line with the process of removing an Appeal Court Judge?

In my view, the silence and acceptance of the way and manner the President announced her removal from her position and posted to another position is what I am worried about. The legal brains in this country should please educate me and I believe, many of us on this matter. I believe that the lady should have been made to resign first from her position as the Commissioner of NCCE, then she would have divested herself of the Constitutional protection of her position before her appointment by the President. In this case, it is the opposite which took place.

In my view once again, should we allow this action of the President to go unchallenged, in future, any President may have a precedence to reshuffle any of the Commissioners of the three bodies under discussion to achieve a political aim should there be a vacancy in any of those institutions. By the act of the President, will it be wrong for any future President to remove the Chairman of the Electoral Commission for example to CHRAJ should there be a vacancy at CHRAJ to enable the President appoint another person to become the Chairman of the Electoral Commission?

Until I am proven wrong in my view, I am scared that President Mahama is gradually extending his reign of impunity to the Constitutionally protected bodies and get away with it just as he has destroyed the economy with such brazen acts of thievery in his government and still dances to the tune of 'yentie obiara'.  The Government wakes up each day and all it does is to impose taxes on the citizenry without corresponding service delivery function to the citizenry. When the people wake up in protest, his response is 'I am a dead goat and no longer afraid of the knife'. A dead goat which is not properly disposed of openly breeds maggots to the chagrin of the public.

The blatant misuse and thievery of the resources of the nation by functionaries of the Mahama administration has made a mockery of the national currency within the comity of international currencies. When men and women of wisdom and patriotic fervour admonish the government over the chosen path which has the potential to send this country into an irrecoverable economic condition, official spokespersons of this blockheaded regime respond with insults. The Ghana Bar Association is in court over the appointment of two Supreme Court Judges, over the process of the appointment?

But for the milk of human kindness in the members of the Ghana Medical Association, this country would have lost all its Medical Doctors in the public health facilities last Tuesday. Where in this world have workers decided to 'sack themselves' when government has not done so? Strikes and withdrawal of services are normal all over the world with organised labour, but Ghana was about to set a record of public workers sacking themselves en-block. How long can we tolerate this? We were 55 years as a Republic just last Wednesday.

By Kwesi Biney
[email protected] .