Baako’s reason not to sue interesting, but not convincing

Anybody who has been studiously reading my takes on Kennedy Agyapong’s impugnation of the chastity and professional integrity of EC Chairperson Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, knows that I am far more interested in her professional integrity as Ghana’s Chief Returning Officer, for obvious reasons, than I am concerned with whomever she chooses to share her affections or sexual favors with besides her husband.

To be certain, I couldn’t care less, as long as she remarkably demonstrated that she was up to the demands of her quite intellectually and administratively exacting job. I also don’t begrudge her for her job – the choice was absolutely her inalienable democratic right.

Still, it can hardly be gainsaid that Mrs. Osei has a bounden obligation to enhance the credibility of how elections are conducted in this country, Ghana, that is.

On the other hand, if she really feels deeply aggrieved by the slanderous suggestion by Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, the Assin-Central New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament, by all means, let her sue for damages; after all, she has some 7, or so, Associate Electoral Commissioners to carry on with the conduct of Election 2016 in her absence.

I guess what I am trying to put across here is that where I concur with Mr. Kweku Baako’s advise for Mrs. Osei to avoid the distractive temptation of legally going after Mr. Agyapong with a defamation suit, is the fact that the demands of a drawn-out litigation suit which, by the way, she could well win, hands down, may likely necessitate her immediate resignation from her job.

And I don’t for a split-second presume that she would be willing to so facilely humor those among her most ardent detractors who would fain have her humor them and their constituents with the same.

I personally have absolutely no interest, whatsoever, in whether she chooses to resign her job as Electoral Commissioner or stay on; the fact still remains irritably immutable that it would, once again, fall on Little Dramani to select and name her replacement.

And so far, the abysmal track-record of Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan and, now, Mrs. Osei, does not convince me a whit that the next NDC-appointed EC Chairperson is apt to be any professionally and/or administratively remarkable improvement on those who have already passed along this way.

I also don’t know what the rules governing slander and/or defamation of the character of public figures and prominent politicians in our country are, but it is quite obvious to me that a legal battle between these two public and political figures is not apt to be a cakewalk, in African-American parlance.

Mr. Agyapong is straight-out a politician, and politicians are legally regarded as public figures who have so professionally and practically insinuated themselves into the business of the people such that they virtually have little that can be neatly and legitimately classified as private lives.

Mrs. Osei, on the other hand, may be aptly envisaged as a public figure who possessed some modicum or appreciable degree of private life until she so forwardly and obtrusively morphed herself into a veritable politician by presuming to quibble with the Supreme Court over what constituted an elitist National Voters’ Register, and thus the protected interests of the ruling party leader who appointed her to her present job.

In other words, as far as keen observers of Ghana’s political scene like yours truly are concerned, Mrs. Osei has so irreparably compromised her responsibility as an even-minded Electoral Commissioner that however well or laudably she performs from now on would hardly matter. Put in plain English, our EC boss is as good as never was.