Akufo Addo May Punge Ghana Into Civil War-U.S. Research Firm

The Centre for Strategic & International Studies

(CSIS), a U.S- based research firm which provides strategic insights and partisan

policy solution to decision makers, governments, international institutions,

the private sector and civil society says the 2012 elections in Ghana may end

in violence.

“A

second, low-to-medium probability but high-impact scenario would be a violently

contested Presidential election in December 2012, which will have the potential

to produce chaos,”the CSIS said in its June 2011 project

report commissioned by the U.S Africa Command (AFRICOM) as part of a report of

a series examining the risk of instability in 10 African countries over the

next decade.

While blaming the potential for violence in the 2012

elections on many factions, including the bitter rivalry between the two

dominant political parties, the NDC and the NPP, the report particularly

mentioned the NPP’s flagbearer, Nana Akufo-Addo’s desperation and his

violence-infested rhetoric as a major spark which can trigger violence in Ghana

during the elections.

“The

role of the NPP leader and expected Presidential candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, will

be crucial and early signals suggest reasons for worry. Akufo-Addo is desperate

to mobilize support, and he has played the ethnic card, referring to the NPP as

“We the Akans”, urging his supporters to “all die be die” – that is, they

should be willing to die to ensure the NPP’s victory”

the report said in part.

Nana Akufo-Addo’s incitement of his supporters to

resort to violence, the history of his supporters beating up supporters of his

main rival, Alan Kyeremanteng, in the run-up to the NPP’s primaries and the

kind of company he keeps makes discerning people in Ghana apprehensive that he

will not hesitate to throw Ghana into a state of anarchy should he lose the

2012 elections, (which is likely) since it is probably his last opportunity to

realize his life-long ambition of becoming President of Ghana.

The CSIS is even more apprehensive about Akufo-Addo

plunging Ghana into civil war because the Abuakwa lawyer nearly did just that

in the 2008 elections first after the results of the December 7, 2008 polls was

announced and again when Prof. Mills beat him to it after the December 28, 2008

run-off.

“Ghana

had a lucky escape during the last Presidential elections in December 2008. The

razor-thin failure of the NPP candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, to win the Presidency

on the first ballot (he missed out by less that 8,000 votes) briefly tempted

the NPP to hang on to power and challenge the official results. In the hours

following the election, then-President Kufuor played a vital role in urging his

NPP supporters to accept the need for a second round. When the NDC candidate,

Atta-Mills, won the second round by the narrow margin of 0.46percent, President

Kufuor again urged acceptance of the results. But, given that he is now in

retirement, Kufuor is unlikely to be ask to exert a mediatory influence in

2012,”the report said, adding, rather gloomily, that “And the NPP hardliners seem to

have seized

control of the campaign.”

In the recently released cables from wikileaks, U.S

Ambassador, Donald Teitelbum noted that though Nana Akufo-Addo reluctantly

congratulating Prof. Mills after the Electoral Commission declared the latter

winner of the 2008 elections, he never conceded defeat.

Many Ghanaians are still wondering what would have

become of Ghana if Akufo-Addo’s henchmen had succeeded in dumping corpses in

the Volta Region as they had been caught on tape planning to do so they could

claim the corpses were their polling agents killed in the NDC stronghold. Then

also was the attempt by Akufo-Addo loyalists to get a High Court sit on a

statutory public holiday to place an injunction on the announcing of the final

results by the Electoral Commission. Fortunately, this backfired.

The penchant to dispute electoral results when they

do not win at the polls has been the stock-in-trade of the NPP and its forbearers

even before independence. In his book DARK DAYS IN GHANA pages 52-56, Ghana’s

first President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, said the Busia-Danquah political tradition,

which the NPP belongs to “…have a long

record of go-slow policies, of subversive activity…unable to gain victory at

the polls, they even resorted to assassination plots in order to impose

themselves on the people of Ghana, and to avenge their political defeat.”

It is these dark days that the CSIS fears may become

the lot of Ghana when the 2012 electoral results are announced, bearing in mind

the behaviour of Nana Akufo-Addo in the 2008 elections.

Stay

tuned for reasons the CSIS’s research unearthed which made it conclude that the

2012 elections is “a potential trigger of instability in Ghana.”