By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Oct. 31, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
In the end, it may not amount to much. But it is still worthy of national attention. And here, of course, I am referring to the destruction of the National Democratic Congress’ biometric membership register by some party stalwarts of the Ledzokuku Krowor Constituency in the Greater-Accra Region. The complaint of the alleged vandals was that a parliamentary candidate in the party’s Nov. 7 primaries by the name of Daniel Amartey Mensah, managed to migrate some 3,000 “foreign names” onto that constituency’s NDC membership register.
Now, we are not specifically told what the label of “3,000 foreign names” means. The obvious definition here could be that these 3,000 names belong to members of the National Democratic Congress who may not be residents of the Ledzokuku Constituency. Or they could be foreign nationals resident in the country, as Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia recently intimated. Or these names could be those of people who may not even be Ghanaian citizens and may well be resident outside the country, even as I write. Which, of course, readily recalls Team Bawumia’s exposé involving the illegal and patently criminal migration of nearly 80,000 voters whose names also appear in the Togolese national voters’ register, we are told, onto Ghana’s voters’ register.
On the latter count, Electoral Commissioner Charlotte Osei has demanded more “comprehensive details” in order for her to be able to decisively act on it, particularly regarding Team Bawumia’s claim that these names had been cloned and scanned into Ghana’s voters’ register, whatever the meaning of such technical description may be. In the equally outrageous case of the Ledzokuku Constituency, we are told that the officially certified number of NDC-affiliated voters eligible to vote is 8,142. But, somehow, with barely a week before the Nov. 7 primaries, the number of voters eligible to cast the ballot in the constituency has jumped to a whopping 11,000-plus. My elementary-level mathematics tells me that the percentage of voters eligible to vote in the Ledzokuku Constituency on Nov. 7 has ballooned by at least 30-percent.
The explanation being given the Ghanaian public does not seem to gibe with administrative competence, on the part of those in charge of electoral protocol in the National Democratic Congress. And that group is headed by Mr. Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, an NDC National Vice-Chairman, who has promised to launch a full-scale investigation into the matter well ahead of the scheduled party primaries. Where explanations appear to tax the administrative competence of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress regards the fact of the old executives of the constituency’s apparent failure to transfer an accurate and well-audited voters’ register to their successors.
I personally doubt that such explanation can be confidently invested with any modicum of credibility. Like most spheres of administrative leadership of the Mahama-chaperoned National Democratic Congress’ government, routinely presenting the public with lame excuses is what the Rawlings Posse does best. We encountered the same attitude when it recently came to light that the Chief Resident of the Flagstaff House and his minions have been using presidential letterheads to conduct shady backdoor business deals with their friends in the corporate establishment. In the latest instance, it had to do with the no-bid contracting of the printing of some presidential diaries. I am assuming that this is done on a yearly basis.
Caught with their pants down, literally speaking, the so-called presidential staffers and the NDC General-Secretary viciously and unconscionably tore into Nana Akufo-Addo, the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) for being honest and patriotic enough to expose them. What makes the bloating of the Ledzokuku Constituency voters’ register with some “3,000 foreign names” quite fascinating is the fact that it happened in the very political party that has been vehemently denying that any such problem exists on the national front. Then also, the alleged destruction of the bloated membership register by some party stalwarts interested in seeing to it that justice and fair play reign at the Nov. 7 primaries, clearly vindicates those on the front benches of the New Patriotic Party, including Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia, who have been vehemently calling for the establishment of a new voters’ register and the summary scrapping of the old one.
I would like to hear what the Chairwoman of the Electoral Commission has to say about this. I would also like to be educated about the relationship between the biometric voters’ register to be used for the NDC primaries on Nov. 7 and our national official voters’ register.
