Investigate And Punish

There is a real crime here; it is called "Voting Fraud." Or "Electoral Fraud." Or "Election Fraud." This is the proverbial elephant in the room, as members of the U.S. intellectual community are wont to say. And yet, this is what even the leaders of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) are curiously refusing to discuss or talk about. Instead, they simply want the current Voters' Register thoroughly scrapped and replaced with a new one.

Hopefully, this new register will not be compromised by the 76,286 Togolese citizens whose photo IDs and vital statistics appear on Ghana's Voters' Register. You see, you cannot claim to love justice and fair play and not want the culprits to be brought to justice.

In other words, what Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia and their associates ought to be fighting for is to have whoever wilfully participated in this epic scam to be promptly brought to justice. There is absolutely no reason to expect that this massive fraud will not be reprised, unless those engaged in it, irrespective of sociopolitical status, are brought to justice. Attempting to make an ethnic or tribal issue out of the Ketu-South scandal would not work. So far, the latter instance appears to be the most serious of all the uncovered cases of massive voter fraud in the country, because the criminal syndicate that orchestrated such fraud had crossed international boundaries to commit such heinous act of criminality. It is tantamount to a foreign occupation, whereby non-Ghanaian citizens are made to determine the choice of who succeeds to the presidency.

Indeed, many of us have always suspected that the leaders of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), led by President John Dramani Mahama, were in cahoots with some of our ECOWAS neighbors to hijack and prejudice our country's democratic culture. Now it appears we were always on the side of the truth, as painful as this may come to those of us proud of our inviolable Ghanaian identity, dignity and sovereignty. The devious attempt by Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the General-Secretary of the NDC, to play the tribal/ethnic card expediently against his own Akan ethnic group will not wash. It will not wash because it is patently irrational and politically motivated.

For starters, it was not only the Anlo-Ewe constituency of Ketu South, in the Volta Region, that was forensically examined and exposed by the Bawumia-led team of NPP biometric-technology experts; other predominantly Akan constituencies such as Ga-West, Adenta Municipality, Kpone and Katamanso, all in the Greater-Accra Region, were spotlighted and highlighted. Then also, Nzema-East, Suaman, Amanfi-East and Sekondi were also determined to have Voters' Registers jam-packed with ineligible voters, largely minors.

Mischievous political operatives like Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, alias General Mosquito, who find it convenient to play the tribal card, had better read what Mr. Chris Bukari Atim's "Letter of Resignation" addressed to the then-Chairman of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), dated December 3, 1983, in which the former Rawlings cabinet appointee extensively details the intrinsically "Ewe-Duopoly" that was the Rawlings-Tsikata-dominated PNDC and draw their own logical conclusions.