Don’t Coddle the Election Thief, Dr. Asare

It is quite clear that it is his own election-rigging demons that are vengefully gnawing at his heart and his conscience – that is, if the Atta-Mills’ death celebrant has any conscience at all – when former President John Dramani Mahama bitterly complains of having reservations about the integrity of the conduct of the 2020 general election (See “Mahama Told to Be Calm, Election 2020 Won’t Be Rigged” Modernghana.com 5/24/19). Indeed, if anybody could be credibly suspected of rigging any election in the country, that person, absolutely no doubt in my mind, Dear Reader, is the former President.

Indeed, as clearly and apologetically attested by the General-Secretary of his own party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the then-Interim President Mahama won the 2012 presidential election and, to be certain, the entire general election that year by default. Mr. Asiedu-Nketia would confess to the host of an Accra radio talk-show host, that then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had narrowly lost the election because the polling agents, observers and local representatives of Mr. Mahama’s most formidable political opponent had not been alert and vigilant enough.

The first sitting President to be massively voted out of power had also made it clear, going into his party’s primaries, that he had no confidence in subjecting himself to any ambitious party members who wanted to offer him a bruising “friendly match.” I am here, of course, referring to the George Boateng Affair. Others had already been cold-shouldered out of the race. As far as I can tell, it was about this time that Comrade Mahama effectively lost the election to Nana Akufo-Addo. In the Gomoa area of the Central Region, for example, even when he was not being seriously given the proverbial run for his money, Mr. Mahama was not coming up with the optimal percentages of votes needed to assure himself of being prepared to face his most formidable opponent.

We also are, each and every one of us, well aware of the shenanigans that led to the constitutionally unwarranted lateral transfer of Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei from the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) to the Electoral Commission (EC), and the presumptuous scofflaw games that Mrs. Osei played with the Georgina Theodora Wood-presided Supreme Court of Ghana to unsuccessfully ensure that her generous paymaster threw the electoral dice in favor of the former Rawlings-appointed Communications Minister. Indeed, it is only pathological megalomania and wishful thinking alone that would make a grossly incompetent and criminally scheming former president like Mr. Mahama woefully underestimate the intelligence of the Ghanaian electorate to suppose that he has any fighting chance at Election 2020.

The man convincingly, albeit scandalously, told Ghanaians that he was not equal to the humongous task of being President of the Democratic Republic of Ghana, when he mordantly castigated the very citizens who had facilitated his accession to the Presidency that only former Presidents Jerry John Rawlings and John Agyekum-Kufuor had a right to criticize his untold poor job performance because, as “absolute nonentities,” Mr. Mahama’s critics had never been deemed to be qualified to assume the Presidency. You see, about the only reason why the former National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Gonja-West could fathom the best qualified Electoral Commissioner in Fourth-Republican Ghana deliberately throwing Election 2020 blindly in favor of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and the New Patriotic Party, stems from the constitutionally unwarranted manner in which Mr. Mahama laterally transferred Mrs. Osei from the NCCE to the Electoral Commission, and then to have his appointee attempt to ride roughshod over the authority of the Wood Supreme Court every step of the way.

And then just recently, through the genius sleuthing – or detective work – of Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa, the newly appointed EC Chair, Ghanaians awoke to the shock of their lives about a fortnight ago, when we were frankly and fearlessly told that at least since 2011, both NDC-appointed former Electoral Commissioners, namely, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan and Mrs. Osei, respectively, had surrendered the Sovereignty of Ghana to the foreign contractor selected by, you guessed it, the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, by granting the concerned contractor exclusive access and rights to the password and other operational codes of the Biometric Voting Machines (BVM) used to determine who become our leaders every four years. We would also learn from Mrs. Mensa that, in fact, the BVM operator/contractor had, somehow, convinced the leaders of the National Democratic Congress and the latter’s key Electoral Commission appointees, that absolutely no Ghanaian-born Information Technology-trained specialists or experts were professionally qualified or competent enough to run a hi-tech-based election system in the country.

To make matters even more, the Akufo-Addo-appointed EC Chair would frankly and forthrightly let on to the Ghanaian electorate, and the citizenry at large, that, in fact, the National Democratic Congress’ operatives have been paying the virtual sinecure of $ 4 Million (USD), annually, to the BVM contractor for absolutely no work done. In other words, it well appears that in scandalously and thievishly allowing the foreign-based BVM contractor to wield a monopoly over password-access to our voting machines, the aforesaid contractor was also being communicated with by the Mahama Posse in much the same manner that the then Vice-President Mahama had suavely communicated “post-contractually” with Mr. Jibril (Djibril) Kanazoe, the Burkinabe businessman, in the infamous racket or scam that became known as the “Mahama-Kanazoe Ford Expedition Payola Affair.”

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

June 1, 2019

E-mail: [email protected]