Violence at 2023 NDC Primaries – Foretaste of 2024 General Election?

I guess one could aptly describe it as a veritably incestuous presidential primary-election slugfest. We are, of course, referring to the 2024 – actually 2023 – National Democratic Congress’ May 13, 2023, nationwide primaries, in which Ghanaians were told the military fatigues-addicted Presidential-Candidate General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama bagged at least 98.99-percent of the votes, most of them purchased at the relatively whopping price of GH₵ 40 apiece. We shall be taking up this aspect of the story in another article or column.

For now, let it suffice to glancingly observe that as was characteristically to be expected, it was the dirtiest primaries to have occurred in Ghana’s 30-year-old Fourth Republican democratic dispensation. And significantly, it had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the country’s Independent Electoral Commission (GIEC), but the deliberate and flagrant decision by the party’s notoriously autocratic leadership, presently commanded by the party’s recent superannuated graduate of the Senior-Staff College of the Ghana Armed Forces, to wit, “Lt.-Col.” Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the longtime dynastic and despotic General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), who also literally arm-twisted his way recently into the National Chairmanship of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-founded faux-socialist political and institutional establishment.

You couldn’t blame the Jean Adukwei Mensa-Chaired Independent Electoral Commission, which had earlier on threatened to completely disengage from participating in the entire process as a result of a court injunction sought by Dr. Kwabena Duffuor, arguably the most formidable contestant and challenger to Candidate Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama, for reasons given as “the incompleteness of the Delegates’ Register” of the National Democratic Congress, as well as what the 2024 Duffuor Presidential-Election Campaign Team described as wanton and widespread irregularities attendant to the party’s Delegates’ Register which significantly detracted from the integrity of the same.

As was to be expected, with the staunch backing of the members of the party’s Council of Elders and the criminal complicity of the irredeemably tainted party stalwarts like Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu and former Speaker Edward Doe Adjaho, The Mosquito Gang at the party’s Headquarters decided that the Voters’ Register’s strategic contamination and corruption was the established and the officially canonized language and modus operandi of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, so it was an absolute waste of time to delay the conduct of the 2024 primaries in a peevish bid to rectifying what had been unanimously agreed upon to constitute the significant and abject lack of integrity of the party’s National Delegates’ Register.

Now, it would be very interesting to see these same NDC leaders run to the courts in search of redress in the wake of the watershed December 2024 General Election, on grounds of the deliberate and the mischievous utilization of an incomplete and contaminated or a strategically corrupted National Biometric Voters’ Register (NBVR). The good news here is that the leadership of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress may very well have set an indelible precedent that may likely come back to haunt them down the line in the offing.

But what we even more significantly wanted to highlight in this apercu or brief and cursory overview of the general conduct of the latest nationwide primaries are the several albeit quite serious scattered incidents of violence that punctuated the NDC primaries in such predictable constituencies as Ningo-Prampram, in the Greater-Accra Region, the electoral stronghold of the notoriously rambunctious street-brawling Mr. Samuel Nartey George – aka Sam George – where some hired party goons were arrested for allegedly taking photographs of the ballot papers of some voting delegates, in an apparent bid for vendetta (See “Eight Arrested for Election Offenses During NDC Primaries – Police” Ghanaweb.com 5/14/23).

In the Asawase Constituency, in the Kumasi Metropolis, in the Asante Region, the parliamentary homecourt of Alhaji Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka, the recently ousted NDC Minority Parliamentary Caucus’ Chief Whip, a supporter of one of the opponents of the latter incumbent was videotaped being severely beaten to pulp, literally. A videotape voiceover informed viewer that the victim, who appeared to be unconscious and supine, was the flunkey of one Massawudu. Whatever the reasons for such gross and barbaric display of mayhem was not the least bit surprising, since Candidate Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama has already put Ghanaians on high alert notice with his characteristically intemperate declaration that the National Democratic Congress was born out of the unspeakable shedding of largely innocent Ghanaian blood, and that should it become necessary once more, the key operatives of the party would not hesitate to “let the blood flow” once more.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 14, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]