Does Gaslighting Martin Amidu See Crushing Defeat for NDC in Election 2024? – Part 7

Now, what does the following encomium from Martin Amidu about Dr. Afari-Gyan tell the Dear Reader about the moral and the psychological and mental caliber and the temperament of the Atta-Mills-appointed Attorney-General and Justice Minister who was thoroughly and seismically trounced by Mr. Samuel Atta-Akyea in the globally infamous and nationally embarrassing Yaa-Naa Yakubu Andani, II, regicide?: “The retirement of Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan was bound to create a vacuum in [at?]the EC unless [the longest-serving Chairperson of the Electoral Commission] was replaced by another experienced and mature person with significant public service experience as a replacement. The EC under Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan supervised the 1996 elections which saw former President Rawlings retain power for the second and last time by beating his opponent, Candidate John Agyekum-Kufuor. The parliamentary election brought a sizeable number of NPP and other independent members of parliament [independent politicians?] into parliament.”

It goes without saying that any 60-plus-year-old Ghanaian intellectual and/or career politician who believes that Dr. Afari-Gyan is the Gold Standard or the ideal and emulative Chairperson of Ghana’s Electoral Commission must be living in the proverbial Fool’s Paradise, or that reprobate character or poor excuse for decent humanity needs to immediately check himself/herself into a mental institution for psychiatric examination, especially if such a person also seriously thinks and believes that Dr. Afari-Gyan is absolutely in any way a better Electoral Commission’s Chairperson or a better Chief Returning Officer than the very best Electoral Commission’s Chairperson that Ghana has ever had, at least so far, in our beloved nation’s Fourth-Republican dispensation.

And by the way, precisely what sort of “sufficient public service experience" is Mr. Amidu referring to here, with specific regard to Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan? At any rate, and maybe this would wake up our happy-go-lucky Martin (Abongo Frafra) Amidu just a morally appreciable bit. And it is the fact that by his own personal and public testimony, following the landmark appointment of Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa as Ghana’s Electoral Commissioner on August 2, 2018, by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress. In case, this implacable Akufo-Addo critic has so soon and scandalously forgotten what his own self-confessed Political Godfather and Mentor said about the sterling and the unimpeachable caliber and the professionally unrivalled qualifications of Mrs. Mensa for the highly volatile and sensitive job of Electoral Commission’s Chairperson, let us repeat the same herein, once again, for the edification of our Chief National Democratic Congress’ Political Propagandist.

As was widely reported by the local Ghanaian media at the time, the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings stated gleefully and confidently that, finally, in the erudite personality of Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa, Ghana had been blessed with the best qualified candidate and appointee for the job of the Electoral Commission’s Chairperson. This most authoritative endorsement by Mr. Rawlings of Mrs. Mensa, Co-Founder and former Executive-Director of the nationally renowned and the internationally respected Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), would shortly be further authoritatively affirmed by Election Observers from the European Union (EU) and other equally credible election observers, including the United States of America, during the 2020 General Election, as unarguably the most transparent and the most efficient of its kind ever conducted in Fourth-Republican Ghana and, perhaps, even in the entire ECOWAS Subregion. And almost definitely the best and the cleanest in the entire postcolonial history of Ghana.

There were no such Afari-Gyan trademark scams as the criminally deliberate registration of underage voters in the 2020 General Election, or any widely reported incidents of deliberately orchestrated under-voting in New Patriotic Party strongholds, as had been the case in the past. We must also quickly point out or remind our readers that the historic appointment of Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa came on the heels and in the wake of the causatively and forensically sustainable dismissal of the then Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, the Mahama-transferred Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), a move that was widely criticized by expert constitutional lawyers and scholars like Prof. Kofi Abotsi, as being statutorily or constitutionally illegitimate, morally untenable and grossly ill-advised, since Mrs. Osei’s seemingly arbitrary transfer by then-President Mahama was also tantamount to a lateral, rather than a vertical, transfer from one of the 7, or so, statutorily sanctioned Independent Commissions whose legally and entrenched statuses required that the work of the heads of each of these “Standing Commissions” would not be arbitrarily or capriciously interfered with by the Appointing Authority.

Rather curiously, a self-proclaimed Constitutional Expert and Scholar like Martin Amidu is conspicuously silent on the epic travesty that was then-President Mahama’s strategically and politically suspect transfer of Mrs. Charlotte Osei from the NCCE to the EC. So, once again, we are left with absolutely no other alternative but to logically conclude that Amidu’s 2024 UDS-sponsored Harmattan School Lecture Presentation had a lot to do with almost anything and everything, except the lowdown and/or downhome truth about the imperative need and the necessity for all Ghanaians, irrespective of class status and ideological orientation or suasion, to staunchly and jealously protect the integrity of the 1992 Constitution, or whatever may be deemed to be such which, by the way, the 2024 UDS-sponsored Harmattan School’s Guest Lecturer claims to be doing.

Indeed, but for the historically opportune and politically unimpeachable appointment of Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa, a first-rate Constitutional and Legal Expert sui generis, that is, virtually in a class all by herself, the scandalously Neocolonialist STL Jinx that the pathologically unconscionable leadership of the National Democratic Congress treasonously slipped around the necks of progressive-thinking and freedom-loving Ghanaian citizens and voters, in collaboration with the aforementioned Israeli-based privately owned IT Company – for how long, it remains to be forensically determined down the road, and may never be fully known, let alone its humongous cost accurately calculated and the criminal masterminds promptly and condignly brought to justice – would pretty much be intact today, even as we speak.

In other words, for those of our readers who really want to understand the implacable hatred harbored by nearly each and every one of the leaders of the National Democratic Congress, in particular the membership of the Corporate Sub-Establishment of the Mahama and the Asiedu-Nketia Posse, for unarguably Ghana’s best and most inimitably efficient Electoral Commission’s Chairperson, the foregoing is the sole and primary cause. Which is also why it behooves all freedom- and constitutional democracy-loving Ghanaian citizens and residents to choose absolutely no other alternative but to staunchly and unflinchingly stand behind the yeomanly work being done by Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa and her equally patriotically committed and indomitable staff of professionally unimpeachable administrators at the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), one of the finest of its kind anywhere in the advanced and civilized democratic world.

In sum, all bona fide and patriotic Ghanaian citizens need to constantly remind themselves, both collectively and severally, that the only thing that presently stands protectively between us and the Darwinian dog-eat-dog barbarism of the faux-revolutionary leadership National Democratic Congress is, you guessed right, Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa and her redoubtable staff of civically responsible and conscientious administrators and workers at Ghana’s Independent Electoral Commission. Jean Mensa is a professionally enviable democratic human institutional establishment in her own right. She is a living human legacy whose incalculable significance and magnitude will not be fully appreciated until at least a generation from now. This is how unimaginably blessed all freedom and democracy-loving Ghanaians are today. God Bless Our Homeland Ghana and Make Us Great and Strong as Never Before!

Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
February 18, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]