By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
In a predictably lame response to Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia's charge that grievous transpositions of votes by polling officials to the election headquarters may well have cost Nana Akufo-Addo the 2012 presidential election, the spokesman for the National Democratic Congress' Legal Team (NDC-LT) was widely reported to have cynically snapped that "Even banks commit transpositional errors" (JoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 6/1/13). Nana Ato Dadzie went on to add that in the case of banking accountants, unless such errors were ferretted out and promptly rectified, the day's transactions would not balance.
Well, I find two things here to be quite interesting and worth highlighting about Nana Ato Dadzie's rather shallow attempt at sophistry. The first of such glaringly shallow ratiocination regards the decidedly laughable attempt by the former Rawlings chief-of-staff to impugn the depth of Dr. Bawumia's appreciation of how transactional balancing is done at the bank.
And on the latter score must be promptly underscored the fact that not only had the star-witness and second-petitioner of Election 2012 distinguished himself as a former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana, but even more significantly, the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for elections 2008 and 2012 has had the rare privilege of shepherding economic and financial projects, such as Ghana's most recent currency re-denomination exercise under the Kufuor administration, where one's flair for account balancing was indispensable.
Secondly, in the case of the sort of vote counting and collation that occurred in Election 2012, no such equilibratory exactitude as demanded of bank accountants was an integral requirement. And, in fact, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, Ghana's Electoral Commissioner, has categorically stated before the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel hearing the Akufo-Addo/NPP petition that the overwhelming majority of election workers, including most of the salaried staff of the Electoral Commission (EC), did not have the kind of high-end professional training and skills required of financial institutional been-counters. And this also largely explains the remarkable incidence of over-voting in the 2012 general election.
What bothers me here is the staggering level of logical and intellectual levity that have been observed to almost invariably attend the reasoning capacity and methodology of both the members of the NDC Legal Team, on the one hand, and the respondents and counsel for the latter, on the other. Maybe somebody ought to point out to people like Nana Ato Dadzie that there is a light-year's difference between an "Analogy" and the primary subjective-instance of comparison.
In other words, the methodical accounting system employed in a banking institution, or establishment, for that matter, is nowhere nearly the same as vote counting and collation, as theoretically and/or even functionally similar as these two phenomena may seem. I find highlighting the foregoing to be imperative because, during his testimony in the witness-box, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the general-secretary of the National Democratic Congress, was to be heard rather sheepishly, albeit brazenly, conflating the two.
We shall, in due course, have occasion to take up Mr. Asiedu-Nketia's patently amateurish conflation of the clear divide between an "Analogy" and "Verisimilitude" or reality, both functionally and theoretically.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
June 1, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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