Bedford mummy truck inscription for the Electoral Commission of Ghana

Folks, God willing, I will turn 63 years old on September 23. Looking back many years ago when I was growing up, most commercial vehicles were made up of Bedford mummy trucks.

One fascinating thing about those vehicles was the inscriptions found on them. It was observed that most of these inscriptions were done according to the state of the vehicle, for example, a fairly new vehicle usually had words like Sea "Never Dries", "Envy No Man", "I shall Return", "Chop Time No Friend", "Otan ni aduro" (Hatred has no remedy).

Popularly among the inscriptions on old and rickety vehicles were: "Poor no Friend", "Ele Mawusi" (It is in the hands of God), "W’ano pe asem" (You like Gossiping), and “Onipa Hia Mmoa” (Man Needs Help).

Stephen Atta Owusu in his feature article, “Inscriptions on Vehicles – Funny and thought-provoking”, tells a story about a chief who unreasonably collected levies from drivers entering his town.

One aggrieved driver wrote in front of his vehicle: “The Chief in this Town is Stupid”, Some elders of the town approached him and advised him to erase the inscription immediately since the chief would not be happy to see such an insulting inscription. The driver erased it and replaced it with “STILL”; implying that the chief was still stupid.

Stephen continued with another hilarious story: A driver who hated Rawlings for ordering the shooting of the senior Army Officers in the former military government, wrote in front of his lorry, “May God kill Rawlings”.

The police arrested him during a road check and took him to the police station. He told the police that he had not finished the sentence when the paint was finished so he was on his way to buy more paint to complete it.

Surprisingly, the police allowed him to go and complete the sentence and come back for inspection. He hurriedly went home and added, “enemies” to the inscription to read: "May God kill Rawlings’ Enemies".

This notwithstanding, there is growing concern about the Electoral Commission's intransigence stance to conduct the limited registration exercise only at its district offices which is an affront to the democratic principles of rule of law and rights of citizens enshrined in the 1992 Constitution of Ghana.

It has been reported that a good number of prospective new voters are finding it difficult to register because of the cost of transportation to district EC offices which could cost more than GHC200.

This is affecting the exercise in hard-to-reach areas and has resulted in abysmal turnout. For instance, it was reported that the EC office in the Afram Plains registered 1 person on day 1, 12 people on day 2, 11 people on day 3, 9 people on day 4, and 5 people on day 5.

But the Electoral Commission has failed to heed the cry of opposition political parties and civil society organisations to get the process decentralised which could undermine the peace, security, and political stability in the country.

The EC seems to be hard of hearing and if I had a Bedford mummy truck, I would have written on it: "One day, one day, monkey go go market. . ."