By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 9, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
I must admit that I admire Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, Ghana’s substantive Electoral Commissioner, having also been one of the first writers to heartily congratulate her, as well as promptly parry off Mrs. Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings’ dastardly attempt to impugn Mrs. Osei’s citizenship and, in effect, her credibility and qualification for the job of Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC). But I was far less infatuated with her – I actually tend to envisage her as my kid sister – to have written her one of those delirious “Love Letters.” The dear reader ought to know what I am talking about. Or don’t you?
Anyway, since her assumption of the post of EC Chair, Mrs. Osei has also made it emphatically clear that she intends to make full use of the constitutional independence afforded her job description as well as those of her staff at the EC. And to be certain, my first annoyance about efforts aimed at luridly manipulating her judgment and administrative authority by a couple of obnoxious members of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), came in the form of the aforementioned so-called Love Letter that one of these consistently incoherent and criminally distractive NPP touts had written her presuming to lecture her on the way to ensure that the credibility of the country’s Biometric Voters’ Register (BVR) was immutably preserved.
To be certain, I found the preceding to be insufferably offensive, morally and politically a nonstarter, particularly since the Love-Letter writer had also earlier on, in the wake of Mrs. Osei’s appointment to her present job by President John Dramani Mahama, made an intemperate public statement seeking to preemptively impugn the professional independence and credibility of the appointee, on the rather lame and farcical grounds that the appointee was known to have close links to the leaders and key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC). Back then, I had wondered what the same self-styled Love-Letter writer would have said or written, if a President Akufo-Addo had been blessed with the privilege of appointing the EC Chair and he had appointed a person with known close ties and/or ideological links to the leadership of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
In other words, right from the get-go, as New Yorkers are wont to say, some snooty elements among the top-echelon membership of the New Patriotic Party had made it curiously and bizarrely clear that they intended to make the work of Mrs. Osei next to the virtually impossible. Make no mistake, the objective of yours truly is not to either observe or insist that the EC Chair has done everything perfectly since she assumed her leadership reins at the EC. For she definitely has not. Not by any fair and/or objective measure.
Rather, my beef with Mrs. Osei has primarily been on grounds of principles and pronouncements. She has mordantly accused the leadership of the New Patriotic Party of being passionately and gratuitously inclined towards the establishment of an “elitist” voters’ register, and that were the NPP leadership to have its way, the general conduct and quality of Ghanaian democracy would be ominously disagreeable (See “Charlotte Osei: If We Listened to NPP, We May Have an Elitist Voters’ Register” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/9/16).
Precisely what is Mrs. Osei alleging here? For example, is she alleging that a “populist” voters’ register that indiscriminately packs the names of registrants, irrespective of nationality, is far more conducive to the development of Ghanaian democracy than a credible voter’s register that effectively guarantees that only people with verifiable Ghanaian citizenship will be allowed to vote? We shall fully take up this rather strange, if not downright scandalous, assertion in near-future column. For now, let us return to the issue at hand.
The EC Chair has also stated that the Supreme Court decision prohibiting prospective voters from using their National Health Insurance Cards as proof of citizenship only applies to Mr. Abu Ramadan, the convicted and disqualified and disaccredited former New Patriotic Party Member of Parliament for Bawku-Central, or some such constituency, on whose cause célèbre case of dual nationality the ruling was based. Here, too, Mrs. Osei who is a professional lawyer, herself, needs to explain precisely why she thinks and believes that this Wood Supreme Court ruling is devoid of any precedent-setting validity.
Needless to say, based on the two preceding instances of her own beliefs and pronouncements, it can hardly be gainsaid that Mrs. Osei has effectively stampeded herself into the administrative cul-de-sac in which she presently finds herself.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
