When Pres. Yar’Adua Congratulates Pres.-Elect Atta-Mills

In all probability, Election 2008 was the best-organized event of its kind on the African continent. Still, such laudable feat ought not to be allowed to conveniently overshadow the grievous threat of the “Volta Virus.” Indeed, as a shoot-from-the-hip NDC propagandist pointed out not quite awhile ago, in delirious response to my clinical and all-too-putative identification of the “Volta Virus,” there may well be some phenomenon called the “Ashanti Virus.” The problem is that I simply have not yet identified or recognized the existence of such a virus.

This, obviously, may have to do with the fact that no Ghanaian ethnic group exists by the nominal designation of “Ashanti,” official political transcription notwithstanding. Of course, we are well aware of the great, historic “Asante” sub-nation, perhaps the most significant of Ghana's postcolonial ethnic polities.

Yes, as I was saying, Election 2008 may indisputably be recognized to have been the best-organized polling event on the African continent. And, perhaps, it would not even be presumptuous to claim Ghana's Election 2008 to easily rival any that have taken place here in the United States or Western Europe. One only has to factor into the equation the fact that the Minnesota race for the United States senate, which began on November 4, 2008, a whole month before Ghana's Election 2008, just got resolved by that Mid-Western state's Supreme Court today (1/5/09).

In the foregoing polling deadlock, Democratic challenger Mr. Al Franken, a well-known scholarly comedian, defeated the Republican incumbent, Senator Norm Coleman, with a piddling 225 votes. And the latter votes came from “mistakenly rejected absentee ballots,” as the New York Times (1/5/09) reported it. The latter may, therefore, well highlight the imperative need to critically examine the high incidence of rejected ballots in the most recent Ghanaian election.

Election 2008, with a remarkable rate of 72% voter turnout, also constitutes one of the highest of its kind anywhere in the democratic world. Still, it would be far from accurate to claim, as some are insisting, that the declared winner and Ghana's President-Elect, Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, received the mandate of the people. Not really, to be certain; for statistically speaking, the former vice-president garnered barely 36% of the electoral mandate, about the same as the losing presidential candidate, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

The good news is that never in the electoral history of Ghana, as Prof. Dennis Austin would readily attest (See Politics in Ghana: 1946-60), has any winner of a presidential election carried the mandate of the people. In 1960, for instance, when the then-ruling Convention People's Party (CPP), the original and pioneering, albeit embarrassingly tautological political machine, chaperoned by the putative Africa's Man of Destiny, was spiritedly challenged by Nkrumah's aging former mentor and Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, Dr. J. B. Danquah, the CPP claimed a victory margin close to 90%, with the United Party (UP) reportedly garnering barely 10% of the total votes cast, still, it is rather sobering to learn that less than 60% of the registered voters actually exercised their franchise. In municipalities like Accra, the turnout figures were even much lower.

Thus last year, as well as during the heat of the Election 2008 presidential campaign, when Prof. Atta-Mills kept repeating that outgoing premier John Agyekum-Kufuor had not acquired the full mandate of the Ghanaian electorate to govern, in real terms, the former tax commissioner's observation could not have been more accurate. The irony, though, is that while, indeed, he won the 2008 presidential election, in practical terms, and like all of his postcolonial predecessors, Prof. Atta-Mills also does not have the mandate to govern. And we hope that his much-touted humility would allow the Tarkwa-born premier-elect to recognize the stark reality of the preceding fact.

The foregoing notwithstanding, it is unquestionably in order for the new Ghanaian premier to be receiving hearty congratulatory messages from leaders all over the world. This is quite routine and veritably perfunctory. It is, however, another breed of quadruped, altogether, when such post-electoral felicitation is coming from the leader of a country whose electoral legitimacy almost squarely hinged on the devious, acrobatic alternation of disqualification and re-qualification of his more formidable opponents well into the final week of the election.

Like the Atta-Mills affair, in the wake of the deliberately induced declaration of the now-President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua as the victor of the 2007 Nigerian presidential election, Mr. Obasanjo's handpicked successor diplomatically counseled his flagrantly shortchanged challengers to seek redress in court. He even claimed to be fully prepared to promptly stand down, if any adverse findings were made against him. Watching the NPP launch a lawsuit against the Ghana Electoral Commission (EC), Mr. Yar'Adua must, almost certainly, have wistfully recalled the comical play-out of his own “election.”

On the latter score, it also bears remarking that President Yar'Adua is widely known to be a cool-headed former chemistry instructor and, like Prof. Atta-Mills, a humble and “reasonably” honest man. Even so, the quite likable Nigerian leader must have been fairly amused by the hopelessly sanguine Atta-Akyea group of crackerjack party attorneys. Which is why President Yar'Adua's congratulatory message to his Ghanaian opposite number, may yet be Prof. Atta-Mills' most significant and relevant yet.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].