What the Carter Center Election Monitors Didn't See

For the most part, I have absolutely no use for the so-called foreign electoral monitors who have, these days, made a religiously routine habit of sprinting into the Third World, particularly African countries, anytime that elections are scheduled to be held. For the most part, these observers and monitors station themselves where they feel safest and comfortable, which means that their observation posts are almost invariably mounted in our cities, with barely any significant contact and/or monitoring purview over the countryside, where the majority of our voters live.

The all-too-mundane result is that subject governments, recognizing this fact, theatrically put on their best performances in order to earn high marks for “transparency” (whatever that means) and efficiency. Thus until the most recent Ghanaian presidential election went into a run-off, not many of these foreign observers, largely American and European, had heard of Tain constituency, in the Brong-Ahafo region of the country, let alone be aware, beforehand, of the fact that the people of Tain had, indeed, been passed over the second time around.

And yet, hardly surprisingly, Ghana was being widely and rapturously commended for having organized, perhaps, the most efficient and decent of general elections on the African continent. The grim reality of factual verity is that you don't have a clean election when a whopping 53,000 registered voters have not been allowed to exercise their constitutionally inalienable franchise.

Besides the preceding, something far more significant occurred in the wake of Election 2008 that not many international, and Western, observers would have noticed, and this is the highly avoidable loss of human lives, however low the number may be! These observers would not have noticed this because most of them departed from the country within 48 to 72 hours after the close of polling.

On January 6, 2009, for instance, Mr. Sulley Alhassan, a staunch supporter of Ghana's New Patriotic Party (NPP), was mercilessly and savagely hacked to death by a group of armed thugs, allegedly, recruited by operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), until recently the main parliamentary opposition party. Both victim and assailants are also believed to have hailed from the highly volatile enclave of Dagbon, in the country's Northern Region, where several years ago the paramount king- or supreme overlord – of the Dagomba people, a major indigenous Ghanaian ethnic polity, Ya-Na Yakubu Andani, was barbarically decapitated, along with some 40 members of his royal court.

And here also, must be highlighted the fact that former strongman and later two-term president of Ghana, Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings, notorious for his tribal nationalism (See M. Adabuga's Rawlings: The Murders and the Lies [2008]), and who may well have catalyzed pre-existent intra-familial feud among members of the Dagbon royal family, headquartered at Yendi, has been unsparing in his fanning of both the embers and flames of discord and dissension between the Abudu and Andani gates, or branches, of the Dagbon royal family. Of course, Mr. Rawlings has also been accused of tactically turning the relatively materially deprived northerners against their better-endowed neighbors and relatives to the south.

But that the deadly political feuding between the Dagbon sub-nationals, which led to the murder of Mr. Sulley Alhassan, occurred in Central Accra, is not wholly accidental. Mr. Rawlings is known to recruit legions of these marginally schooled northerners as human pit-bulls who routinely provide him with personal security detail and well as being sicced on known political opponents of the now-ruling National Democratic Congress.

Other equally dire incidents have occurred in the Accra metropolis but outside the Dagbon and/or Muslim communities. For instance, news reports recount residential/tenant lease agreements being unilaterally and summarily revoked in situations where the landlord/landlady belongs to the now-ruling National Democratic Congress and the unfortunate tenant is either a registered and card-carrying member of the outgoing New Patriotic Party or simply a known staunch member of the same. In most of the reported instances, it is almost wholly members of the NDC who, feeling emboldened by their party's recent electoral victory and resumption of the reins of national governance, after eight years in the opposition, resort to mayhem and other forms of hostility with virtual impunity.

Ironically, reported incidents of mayhem have skyrocketed in converse correlation to newly-elected premier Prof. Atta-Mills' solemn and passionate appeal for national reconciliation and unity; President Atta-Mills has also promised to run a government devoid of the sort of vendetta traditionally associated with the NDC.

Maybe it was this apparently woeful inability to promptly rein in its obstreperously nihilistic elements that prompted an NDC upstart propagandist to write and publish a slushy article presumptuously captioned, “The Speech President Mills Should Deliver,” the seventh paragraph of which unctuously urged the former University of Ghana law school professor to assert the following: “I believe in CENSUSES [consensus?] building for the betterment of the country” (Modernghana.com 1/7/09).

*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: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.

   Comments3