Election Disputes in Ghana Are Routinely Settled in Court, Candidate Mahama

He is really a funny man, if, indeed, the former President who set up the All-Northern-Descended and the most corrupt and most ethnocentric Board-of-Directors of any taxpayer-sponsored development program in Ghana’s postcolonial history thinks that he could easily pull a fast one on the astute, dynamic and foresighted administrators of the Electoral Commission, and thereby give himself enough wiggle room for gratuitous litigation in the certain event of Mr. John Dramani Mahama’s massively losing the 2020 Presidential Election to a visionary and development- and progress-oriented President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, then, of course, he is fooling absolutely nobody but himself (See “Mahama Criticizes EC Over New Advisory C’tee” News Desk-Modernghana.com 12/10/19).

It goes without saying that all Ghanaians, including those who will be voting for the very first time in Election 2020, are well aware of the fact that Ghana is a law-governed sovereign democracy where any problems arising from our electoral process are peacefully and wisely settled in legitimately constituted courts of law, often in the superior courts and the highest court of the land and not, as the former President would mischievously have the rest of the country and the global community believe, by the executive operatives of the Christian Council of Ghana, among the executive operatives and/or authorities of other non-Christian religious bodies. So maybe somebody more civically savvy ought to inform the sometime Atta-Mills’ lieutenant that the country’s 1992 Republican Constitution specifically stipulates the healthy need for the Separation of the Church and the State, or all religious institutions and/or establishments from interfering with crucial matters pertaining to questions of who wields power or the most significant of public offices in the country.

Besides, each and every individual executive operative or administrator of the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG) is a bona fide Ghanaian citizen who is eligible and qualified to vote in both local and national elections. And so are also, of course, members of the bench or the judiciary, including Justice William Atuguba, the retired Supreme Court jurist who so shambolically presided over the Akufo-Addo- and Bawumia-led 2012 Presidential-Election Petition. So, really, what is Candidate Mahama up to these days? And just who has been so badly advising this thoroughgoing corrupt megalomaniac? We know, for example, that Nana Ato Dadzie, one of the key legal lights of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), has been named to the 21-member Eminent Advisory Committee established by the executive operatives of the Electoral Commission to monitor and ensure that Election 2020 is free and fair.

It is also nothing short of the patently preposterous, in the evergreen words of the immortalized Prof. Albert Einstein, that Ghanaians and our Electoral Commission (EC) can be expected to do things the same old functionally stultifying manner with the scandalous objective of obtaining new and different results each and every time and turn. This is simply inexcusably absurd. The preceding ought to eloquently inform the Ghanaian electorate of the fact that the former President has absolutely no new and refreshingly progressive or meaningful ideas for the development and quality-of-life upgrade of the country; and also that the University of Ghana’s second-class graduate in history has absolutely no viable clues about governance, and not just about democratic governance.

In short, the non-starter proposal by Mr. Mahama to the effect that EC Commissioner Jean Adukwei Mensa allow the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) to continue sabotaging and frustrating the progressive activities of the most significant democratic pillar or establishment in the country is absolutely nothing short of just that, that is, indisputably a non-starter and one that must be promptly ignored for the good and the salutary and progressive development and the enviable deepening of Ghana’s democratic culture.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
December 12, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]