Akufo-Addo EC Appointees Better Qualified than Mahama and NDC Appointees

I write to heartily commend Ghana’s First Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Mr. Joseph Osei-Owusu, for promptly and roundly rejecting intemperate, gratuitous and downright illegitimate calls for two of the three newly appointed Commissioners to the country’s Independent Electoral Commission (GI/EC) to immediately resign their statutorily mandated and constitutionally sanctioned appointments by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo (See “[Some] Ghanaians Are Too Petty – Joewise Speaks on Appiahene As Electoral Commissioner” Pulse.com.gh 4/17/23).

The three replacement appointees for the three recently retired Deputy Commissioner and two Associate Commissioners, respectively, are Dr. Peter Appiahene, Ms. Salima Tijani and Rev. Akua Ofori-Boateng. The retiring administrators of the Electoral Commission who are being replaced by the foregoing appointees are Mr. Ebenezer Aggrey-Fynn, Hajia Mrs. Sa-Adatu Maida and Mrs. Rebecca Kabukie Adjalo.

Among the most vocal protesters against the perfectly legitimate appointments of Dr. Appiahene and Hajia Tijani is the notorious and fanatically leftist pro-National Democratic Congress (NDC) so-called Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO) Civil Society Organization (CSO). The rationale behind this patently intemperate and illogical demand for the withdrawal of the two aforementioned appointees is that Dr. Appiahene, an alumnus of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, has been actively engaged in the sponsorship of TESCON, that is, the student wing of the ruling New patriotic Party (NPP); and also that Hajia Salima Tijani, by the mere fact of her active participation in the affairs of the ruling party, summarily disqualifies her from objectively serving as a non-partisan and a non-ideologically inclined or heavily politically influenced Electoral Commissioner.

As the First Deputy Parliamentary Speaker, who also doubles as the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Asante-Bekwai, in the Asante Region, pointed out in his poignant rejoinder to the protesters, such inescapably partisan demand as is being made by CODEO is both inexcusably preposterous and absolutely without merit, being that Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution endows each and every bona fide Ghanaian citizen with the inalienable right to belong to and/or support any of the country’s two major institutionally organized ideological camps and any of the legitimately constituted political parties in the country.

In sum, short of being well armed with any forensically incontestable evidence pointing towards the abject lack of the requisite academic credentials and political qualifications for the job, these vehement and passionately partisan protesters have absolutely no logical legs to stand their arguments for the withdrawal and/or the resignations of Dr. Appiahene and Hajia Tijani on. Even more significant ought to be highlighted the fact that for more than a decade-and-a-half, the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led tandem regimes of the Provisional/National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) dominated our national political landscape as a one-party rag-tag combination of junta and faux democratically elected left-leaning dictatorship, during most of which period both the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission and the two Deputies of the Chairperson and the five other Associate Electoral Commissioners were hermetically and exclusively selected and appointed by the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy.

And for more than two decades, the membership of the top administrative staff of the EC was heavily dominated by citizens who closely and brazenly hewed to the faux-leftist ideological suasion of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, including the very first two Chairpersons of the Electoral Commission, the second of whom, by the way, was statutorily and illegitimately transferred from the coordinate and lateral post of Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) to the EC, a presidential policy decision that is categorically cautioned against by the Constitution and one that was publicly criticized by Prof. Kofi Abotsi, of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), in a widely read and referenced academically brilliant and logically flawless and highly readable media column.

Many members of the country’s intellectual community had hoped that the then-President John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama would pay heed to the constitutionally express advisory not to laterally transfer the heads of any of the statutorily mandated Commissions arbitrarily from one coordinate or similarly constituted commission to another, by appointing a completely new face to the post that had recently been vacated by a retired Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, but all to absolutely no avail.

Now, it is very significant to highlight the fact that the Chief Architect of the landmark Repeal of the odious Criminal Libel Law, a British colonial relic unwisely and extortionately appropriated by the leaderships of both Rawlings-fangled and spearheaded junta of the Provisional National Defense Council and the shambolically civilianized National Democratic Congress, to wit, the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has never once during the course of the last seven years that he has been President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, violated the constitutionally entrenched protocol governing the appointments and transfers of any of the Chairpersons of the seven, or so, National Commissions – regarding the latter count, this writer stands promptly to be corrected.

This studious fidelity to the tenets and edicts of Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution is absolutely no happenstance, for President Akufo-Addo is a redoubtable legal luminary who appreciates the established laws of the land in ways that can hardly be said of the twice-trounced pathologically megalomaniacal and incurably narcissistic former one-term President John Gnassingbe “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 16, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]