As President Mahama sings, his opponents cry!!

By Dr. Michael J.K. Bokor

Thursday, June 13, 2013

A clearly harmless statement of faith made by President Mahama has been seized on, tossed and turned, and twisted by all manner of people for obvious political purposes. I disagree with all these people and will explain why.

We must note here that President Mahama wasn’t even commenting on the NPP’s petition. He was referring to Election 2012 in which he participated. And Election 2012 is larger than the NPP’s bogus and odious petition.

First, let’s place everything in perspective. On Monday, President Mahama addressed NDC supporters at the party’s headquarters in Accra to mark the NDC’s 21st anniversary. He told them that “Our victory was won cleanly and fairly,” and expressed confidence that “Justice will be served” and that he could not come to any other conclusion than acknowledging “the very transparent, free and fair victory that we won at the elections”.

Hardly had the import of his utterance sunk than the so-called Young Patriots of the NPP bared its teeth to attempt cutting him to size. They have been followed by others, including a so-called lecturer (Ampaw) and now, Samuel Okudjeto, who is reported to have described as “very very unfortunate” President Mahama’s pronouncements. Okudzeto said the president “should never have made such a statement”.

We are not done with him yet and will know more to be able to place him and all the others thinking like him where they belong.

Okudzeto told XYZ Breakfast Show host (Moro Awudu) on Thursday that the President’s statement was “not right”. According to him, “the court is there to find out whether the whole of the electoral process was done properly; whether indeed those who were declared to have won, have won; whether indeed there were malpractices in the process”.

He, therefore, found it befuddling for the president to have made those comments saying: “…The court has not come to a conclusion so how can you be making statements to show that the thing was proper?.

“If that’s the case, then why are we in court?” He fumed.

Okudjeto fumed for nothing. Who cares about their being in court? Certainly, not President Mahama or I. They are in court because they want to challenge Nature, which has left them gasping for breath. They are in court because of their own irresistible tendency to regard the Presidency as their entitlement and can’t believe that the Ghanaian voters repudiated them at Election 2012.

To the ordinary Ghanaian voter who chose President Mahama, Election 2012 is long gone into the dustbin of history. It is only disappointed loud-mouthed and empty braggarts who cannot come to terms with this reality that are in court, wasting everybody’s time and the country’s resources to cry themselves hoarse over spilt milk.

After exhausting their energies, they will learn better how not to insult the intelligence of the Ghanaian voter and to descend from their ivory tower of self-importance to learn the lessons of politics the hard way. Election 2016 will re-confirm their sad fate for them to know why they are in bad reckoning.

Probably, these malcontents need help to understand issues from a wider angle. Confused and frustrated NPP followers like Okudjeto can’t bring themselves to know the reality that struck them at Election 2012. They are acting as if not thinking right.

Do they expect anybody not seeing things through their blinkers to act the way they do? That the President has no right to comment on what is of interest to him just because a group of malcontents have rushed to seek political power in the dark chambers of the Supreme Court and not the general elections?

How do these NPP people think at all? That they have the exclusive right to comment on the elections and their useless petition while President Mahama or any other person in the NDC doesn’t have to do so? Or do they expect the President to seek their consent before commenting on national issues of the sort that he raised in his interaction with his supporters? Who at all do these NPP malcontents think they are? To me, they are nothing but a bugbear to be discarded with little or no respect. Not even with a ceremony.

Any attempt to fault President Mahama on the basis of his utterance’s tendency to prejudice the hearing of the petition is the height of idleness and stupidity. Here are just two questions for Okudjeto and Co. to answer for me:

• What is prejudicial about that statement of affirmation of faith and truth in Election 2012 as the President saw things?

• What is harmful about a President acknowledging his victory at the polls as a reflection of what he truly believed transpired at the polls?

Of course, the majority electoral decision was made by the voters in the open. All the ballots were counted and the results disclosed in the open. All those who thronged the polling stations heard and saw all that transpired. Those who needed to jubilate did so. In the camp of those whose hopes were dashed, two plain layers emerged: those with the voice of reason wanting their fate to be accepted and plans made for future elections and those wrong-headed elements now in the Supreme Court crying wolf.

The reality is not difficult to ascertain. Even during the voting process, nobody raised any concern that ballot boxes were being stuffed with ballots for President Mahama. Again, no voter was found to have been given more than the stipulated single ballot to cast. No one has ever since come forward to own up to seeing anybody stuff ballot boxes with extra votes or participating in anything of the sort.

None of the NPP’s polling agents complained about any misdeed at the polls nor did any lodge any formal protest anywhere to suggest that underhand deals occurred on Election Day to favour President Mahama and deny Akufo-Addo the chance to be Ghana’s President.

The ongoing petition hearing at the Supreme Court hasn’t unearthed anything spectacular to change the dynamics of Election 2012. All that we have had so far, especially from the cross-examination of Dr. Afari Gyan by Addison, is a repetition of the same old, tired, and worn-out allegations and known facts about the challenges that the EC faced in the 2012 elections (just as it did in previous ones).

The NPP’s so-called claim of “water-tight evidence” has been virtually reduced to rubble as the KPMG’s work is gradually exposing the weakness of their article of faith (the pink sheets). Padding, mislabelling, duplicating, triplicating, and quadruplicating these pink sheet exhibits won’t escape notice, which is why the hearing has even been interrupted on a number of occasions, only to be adjourned to June 24.

All this while, we have heard statements from all manner of people concerning this petition. Even before the petition went to court, the NPP leaders themselves had based all hopes on it and created the self-serving impression that victory was already theirs. All that needed to consolidate it was for their petition to go through the mill of formality in the dark chambers of the Supreme Court.

The legal team of the NPP has been abroad on several occasions to make statements affirming such perspectives and more than created the impression that anything but victory at the court would amount to war being declared on the country by them.

That explains why Kennedy Agyapong, Kofi Jumah, and Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie have led the pack of malcontents to make unceasing foul utterances that directly threaten the well-being of people and the Supreme Court itself.

How will we so soon forget Kennedy Agyapong’s open castigation of Dr. Afari Gyan as “the devil” and his despicable urge that God should kill him—just because he saw Dr. Afari Gyan as the perpetrator of the NPP’s electoral defeat?

What haven’t the NPP leaders and their followers openly said about Justice Atuguba and others (Justice Adinyira inclusive) on the panel that they perceived—and wrongly too—as NDC sympathizers? Cast your mind back to how the NPP petitioners protested at the initial stage of the Supreme Court’s hearing of their petition only to eat back their vomit, and you should know the drift of my concern.

That aside, we have been given worse public utterances by almost everybody who matters in the NPP as far as this petition is concerned. No one saw any need to condemn such people for their prejudicial utterances; but as is predictably clear, they are doing so now just because President Mahama has made a statement on the elections that he won with the goodwill of the Ghanaian electorate!

If all these people want to know the truth, let them prepare themselves for it. I will tell them straight to their faces that President Mahama is above all of them in every sense of the word not only because he is the Number One Citizen of the land but also because he has every constitutional right to enjoy his prominence as a bona fide citizen of Ghana.

And exercising his freedom of speech is an inalienable right. Once he doesn’t say anything that endangers the security of the state, he should be allowed to enjoy that right. After all, as a party to this petition, if he doesn’t speak for himself, who else will?

If the NPP people didn’t want him to comment on Election 2012, why did they attach him to their petition?

From what has transpired so far at the Supreme Court, there is no shred of evidence to confirm the allegations made in the useless petition that is being heard. The fact that the KPMG is even recounting and auditing the quantum of pink sheet exhibits on which the petitioners have banked their hopes should be enough to jolt them out of their cocoon of self-importance.

No amount of condemnation from them will deter the President from saying what he has to say in acknowledging where Fate has placed him. If they think otherwise, they can go and burn the sea.

I shall return.

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