When Feudal Kingmakers Decry Democracy

For the leadership of a political party that publicly acknowledged that it had deliberately rigged up its 2024 Presidential-Election Primary Delegates’ Voters’ Register to favor the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), namely, John “STX” Dramani Mahama, to be self-righteously decrying genuine errors made in the tabulation of figures in the recent Electoral Commission-sponsored Limited Voter Registration Exercise as a deliberate ploy signaling the intention of the key administrators of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to rig the watershed 2024 General Election in favor of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), constitutes the very height of irony (See “Electoral Commission has been reduced to 'Error Commission' in simple arithmetic — NDC” Modernghana.com 5/16/24).

It is equally ironic or, properly speaking, a double irony, because that was precisely what the National Democratic Congress-appointed Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, Fourth-Republican Ghana’s “longest-playing” Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, did for most of the 20-plus years that the former University of Ghana’s political science lecturer managed the country’s most sensitive manifestation of our democratic culture. The University of California, Santa Barbara, doctoral-degree holder would sheepishly inform the Atuguba-presided panel of Apex Court Judicators, in the 2012 Akufo-Addo-led Presidential-Election Petition, that he had willfully and deliberately permitted local party executives of the country’s two major political parties, viz., the then-ruling National Democratic Congress and the country's extant main opposition New Patriotic Party, to register underage minor Ghanaian citizens to criminally exercise the franchise in the 2012 General Election.

Dr. Afari-Gyan would also, clearly in contravention with established statutory protocol, create some 35 parliamentary seats, with barely four months to the December 7, 2012, General Election. All of which preceding narrative is absolutely in no way, whatsoever, to excuse or justify any blunders, even genuine blunders, that might have been committed by some operatives of the Jean Adukwei Mensa-chaired Independent Electoral Commission. The unvarnished truth of the matter is that until the auspicious and opportune appointment of Mrs. Mensa, former Executive-Director of the prestigious Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), originators of the short-lived or defunct Presidential Debates in Fourth-Republican Ghana, the key operatives of the self-proclaimed “revolutionary” establishment of the National Democratic Congress had treated the entire institutional apparatus of the Electoral Commission as their pet political toy.

In the year 2000, for only one striking example in passing, but for the timely intervention of His Excellency, Mr. Craig Murray, at the time Deputy British High Commissioner to Ghana, the results of the Presidential Election of the latter aforementioned year would have been criminally and mendaciously called in favor of the epic loser, namely, then former Vice-President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, the Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-coronated Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress. As Deputy High Commissioner or Ambassador Murray later narrated the blow-by-blow account of what actually transpired in the Strongroom of the Electoral Commission’s Accra Headquarters, Dr. Afari-Gyan had a couple of National Democratic Congress’ hired thugs or goons with AK-47s pointing at his head and threatening to literally blow out his brains, if the Bono Region native made the “stupid mistake of calling the results in favor of the real winner of the 2000 Presidential Election, to wit, Candidate John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor.

But for his more serious and historically credible threat to call in the British Army, to teach these faux-socialist National Democratic Congress’ knuckleheads and vote-stealing apparatchiks where real and true power in the erstwhile British Commonwealth of Nations, presently simply The Commonwealth, lay, Ghanaians may very well have had the wrong choice of candidate imposed on them for at least the next four years! Very likely, the numerical tabulation error or blunder committed by some otherwise diligent personnel of the Independent Electoral Commission during the recent Limited Voter Registration Exercise was the direct result of the constant harassment of Chairperson Jean Mensa and her staff of proven hardworking and patriotic bona fide Ghanaian citizens by hired thugs and goons of the politically desperate leadership of the nation-wrecking juggernaut that is the entire institutional establishment of the National Democratic Congress, pompously chaperoned by Mr. Fiifi “Tiafi” Kwetey, the Asiedu-Nketia-shoehorned General-Secretary of the latter party.

It is quite obvious that the very kleptomaniacal political charlatans who sold the hard-won franchise of Ghanaian citizens to a privately owned Israel-based Information Technology (IT) Company called STL, to be clearly and neatly differentiated from STX, the South Korea-based building construction company that won a deliberately NDC-rigged Judgment-Judge Bonanza of some $250 million (USD), without having dug even an inch-deep sod or trench in the ground, a la National Cathedral Infamy, think that they can deploy just about any crude arm-twisting gimmickry, instead of showcasing their inglorious and voter-appeal bereft performance track record to the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters as a surefire means of clinching unimpeachable victory in the 2024 General Election, in particular the 2024 Presidential Election.

You see, insulting Ghanaian citizens and voters by autocratically recycling the Presidential Candidacy of a twice-defeated, one-term former President Mahama is an insufferable insult for which most Ghanaian voters are highly unlikely to forgive The Mosquito Gang anytime soon. You see, Ghanaians may not look to be among the smartest of the human species on Planet Earth, at least in the arrogant and the disdainful imagination of Candidate “I Have No Classmate in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, but we are also not among the most idiotic species of humanity either.

A man who wants to be returned to Jubilee House, so that: “I can correct my past mistakes,” is not the idea of the most ideal Candidate for President in the opinion and the imagination of most Ghanaian voters and citizens. And the charlatanic likes of Fiifi “Tiafi” Kwetey and Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia had better etch this immutable fact down the deepest recesses of their minds. Indeed, even as the recent superannuated graduate of the Senior-Staff College of the Ghana Armed Forces once said, not very long ago, “Monkeys Play by Sizes.” Which simply contextually means that John “Payola-Guzzling” Dramani Mahama is absolutely no classmate or playmate of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
May 16, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]