Kofi Jack's Lantern

Occasionally, the odd journalist makes the news for a change: There was the story this week about a news reporter in Tamale, who scurried about in the metropolis all smeared with goat blood reportedly scooped from a downtown abattoir and doing the kangaroo dance. Absolutely wacky, Jomo.

The kangaroo dance is an election campaign caper which the New Patriotic Party appropriated from the antics of young Ghanaian football players who executed it on the turf in celebration of goals during the last African Nations Cup tournament.

It has been alleged that the journalist had tried to please some politicians and make a buck or two on the side, by having pictures of himself soaked in blood printed in the newspapers.

The objective? To portray opposition elements as perpetrators of violence who set upon and mauled journalists who covered the recent voter registration exercise.

You can see from this news reporter's weird expedition, that politics can be injurious to your sanity and especially in an election year.

Why would any politician condone such conduct even if it served a propaganda purpose?  Repeat the question..!

Early this week, I typed the word “diogenic” in an office computer, certain that the darned machine would throw back the word, underlined with the usual red mark indicating a misspelling.

Sure enough it did, but that has not stopped me from insisting that there should have been such a word in the dictionary.

I coined the word from the name of Diogenes. That was the Kofi Jack character who spent much of his lifetime walking about in the streets of Athens in ancient Greece with a lantern in broad daylight, saying he was searching for an honest man?

Given the strange happenings of the election season, we need to apply the diogenic principle in our scrutiny and assessment of the presidential candidates :

We need to determine the real motivation behind each candidate's quest to occupy the presidency.

In the second instance, we need to gauge from what we see and know about each candidate, how he is likely to manage the very awesome power he wants us to entrust to him, see?

We are at a stage of our development where we stand the risk of having some character get behind the wheel of nationhood and drive us clear off the cliff overhanging socio-economic progress, and straight into an era of national retardation  or ruination.

History does not say whether Diogenes found the man Ghanaians are today looking for. Who is an honest man?

He is the man who admits and speaks the truth and let every spin fetish priest spare us Pilate's hackneyed query about truth. I have never been a fan of relativism, Jomo.

In the mean time, some people want Dr Afari Gyan's skull on a pole. Let the man take an overdue walk into the sun set they say. Make no mistake:

There appears to be a consensus that Dr Gyan has been a competent chief of the Electoral Commission.

Around that same consensus however, is another to the effect that he has fully served his time and paid his dues in full and that new, daunting challenges in the electoral politics of Africa demand a vision and resourcefulness that was missing in the conduct of the recent voter registration exercise.

It was a mess, Jomo: The shortage of registration materials, the long queues and the eventual demand that prospective voters provide their own photographs for voter cards.

Yet with only a few months to go to the election, it seems risky to make Dr Gyan take a walk. We can only hope that in the interest of a peaceful poll devoid of dangerous circus scenarios, the man has learnt his lesson!

There is a thriving enterprise in campaign polls, going on. Most of the polls have however been described as laughable at best.

Someone with an apparent knowledge about the methodology and ethics of polling was in cyber space this week pointing out gross deficiencies in the methodology of the so-called polls.

He noted how some of the pollsters conducted their polls in some regions and then tried passing them off as national polls.

They also used very questionable methods of analysis and interpretation of the results, which had the capacity to yield misleading conclusion, he said. 

That apart he argued, some of the polls had been conducted by people known all over town to have glaring sympathies with some of the political parties and candidates contrary to the ethics of polling which demand total neutrality on the part of pollsters.

What is more, the polling samples were not representative of our voter population.

The samples did not consciously cover the rich and the poor, the youth and the old, the urban and the rural dweller and did not run across the spectrum of the various ethnic groups.

In short, Jomo, they were methodologically unscientific, analytically spurious, biased, unprofessional, and debatable in their conclusions and best cosigned to the bin.

The numerous internal party pressure groups which have been chasing the NPP presidential candidate across town, each demanding that he names their favourite as running mate, were rudely jolted by an unexpected development:

Apparently driven to insomnia by all the pressure, Nana Akufo-Addo finally caught a brain wave. By Wednesday, he had resolutely cleared the crowd of jostling vice-presidential aspirants off the board of contention.

No sooner had he come up with an entirely unexpected list for the consideration by top party hierarchy however, than another jazz tune of protest went up:

Why is Akufo-Addo handing over the slot to last minute intruders while deserving veterans stand by?

By the time you read this, the NPP's candidate would have had a running mate at last and party rank and file would have no choice than to ride along with the duo to the poll.

A foot note, Jomo: National Democratic Congress presidential candidate Professor J. E. A. Mills this week joined the Committee for joint Action to picket outside Parliament House against the Government's intended sale of 70 per cent of shares in Ghana Telecom to Vodafone.

Various aspects of the original agreement for the sale were reviewed following complaints that Ghana Telecom was being sold for grade-three peanuts and a lousy song.

It is dicey, nontheless: There are many who are staunchly against the sale any time, any day and under any agreement!

By George Sydney Abugri

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