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02.05.2019 Feature Article

Gen. Mosquito May Have Forgotten This

Gen. Mosquito May Have Forgotten This
02.05.2019 LISTEN

As a hopelessly crooked but seasoned politician, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the longtime General-Secretary of Ghana’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), must have conveniently forgotten this and so those of us with a sound long-term memory capacity are obligated to remind him about what he told a radio talk-show host in 2012, shortly after the extant Chairman of the Electoral Commission (EC), Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, declared that year’s President Election in favor of then-Interim President John Dramani Mahama. Well, as I vividly recall, back then, the man popularly and derisively nicknamed “General Mosquito” apologetically declared that, in reality, Dr. Afari-Gyan had called the 2012 Presidential Election in favor of the wrong candidate; and that then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had won the election fair and square. And, also, that the results of the 2012 Presidential Election had been successfully doctored because Nana Akufo-Addo’s polling agents and representatives had not been vigilant enough.

Back then, the presidential incumbent had, literally, avoided being royally trounced by the skin of his teeth. The Atuguba-presided Supreme Court Election-Petition Panel had dubiously concluded that Mr. John Mahama had defeated his most formidable challenger by barely 50,000 votes. That verdict was “dubious,” as we later learned, because the votes of some of the Atuguba-presided panel members had been deliberately and deviously switched around several times by either the presiding judge and/or his assigns to favor the incumbent and fellow northerner. We would learn the preceding from a foundation-endowed Nigerian scholar who had, reportedly, reviewed the entire adjudicatory process of the Atuguba-presided panel. Four years on, the real truth would come to light when then-President Mahama was roundly and mercilessly defeated by then-Candidate Akufo-Addo, who was taking his third shot at the Presidency, by more than one-million votes. Now, a morbidly desperate Mr. Asiedu-Nketia has the temerity to claim that there were reasonable grounds for the leaders of the National Democratic Congress to have roundly rejected the results of the 2016 general election (See “We Could Have Rejected the 2016 Election Results – Mosquito” Modernghana.com 4/24/19).

We perfectly well know that Chairman Jerry John Rawlings’ former Deputy Defense Minister is jiving because like Dr. Afari-Gyan, the Chief Returning Officer of the 2016 general election, Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, had been appointed by a National Democratic Congress’ presidential incumbent. But what is patently absurd about Mr. Asiedu-Nketia’s impugnation of the integrity of the 2016 general election, is the veritable poppycock that, somehow, with the NDC’s own hires or EC employees firmly in charge of the entire conduct of the electoral process, that “the results [of Election 2016 had been] electronically tampered with.” Well, the fact of the matter is that the blistering defeat of then-President Mahama, heading into Election 2016, had been scandalously heralded by the flat refusal by General Mosquito to have any disgruntled and possibly potentially far more competent presidential candidates run against an increasingly grossly and hopelessly incompetent Mr. Mahama in the party’s presidential primary. And, on the latter count, of course, I am referring to the inescapably farcical intimidation and stampeding of Mr. George Boateng, the former Oyarifa local Youth Organizer of the National Democratic Congress. There were also a couple of party heavyweights who had wanted to run against Mr. Mahama, but for the lurid shenanigans of General Mosquito.

We are also well aware of the fact that but for the firm insistence of globally distinguished Ghanaian citizens like Mr. Kofi Annan, the immortalized former General-Secretary of the United Nations (UNO), that Mr. Mahama promptly and civilly concede defeat, the country may very well have been plunged into at least some form of civil unrest, if not a full-blown and/or full-scale civil war. So, it is rather preposterous for Mr. Asiedu-Nketia to pretend as if Ghanaians were a bunch of spineless toadies. If, indeed, the leaders of the NDC were really serious about challenging the results of the 2016 Presidential Election, they could still do so even as I write, although, even as General Mosquito rather vacuously claims, the results of the last elections have yet to be gazetted, for the simple reason that President Akufo-Addo has been duly sworn in as the legitimate and substantive leader of the ruling New Patriotic Party for more than two years now.

Somebody also needs to remind General Mosquito that Ghanaians have taken enough abuse, intimidation and electoral theft from the “patapaa” leaders of the NDC to be easily cowed by the same cutthroat robber-barons this time around.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

April 25, 2019

E-mail: [email protected]

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