By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Since it came to light that Mr. Yaw Boateng-Gyan had been fervidly preparing National Democratic Congress youths to cause mayhem and carnage in the run-up to Election 2012, I have not thought much about the man. The fact that some NDC heavyweights, including cabinet appointees, had also been mentioned in the plot, made the current presidential-election impasse all the more predictable.
But that Mr. Boateng-Gyan, the NDC's National Organizer, would so blaphemously assert that Ghanaians are the dumber for expecting a free and fair election, readily exposes the Mahama posse for what it has always been, a bunch of self-righteous and self-serving crooks who would have the rest of us normalize corruption and ballot-rigging as the salient ingredients of Ghanaian democracy. I hope the members of the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court hearing the Akufo-Addo/NPP presidential election petition are paying sedulous attention (See "Boateng-Gyan: Elections Can't Be Free And Fair; Even Christ Erred" Peacefmonline.com/Ghanaweb.com 7/19/13).
Indeed, that human institutions are by their very nature imperfect is not moot. Still, the very acknowledgment of the latter fact does not license any individual or group of political operatives to willfully commit criminally culpable offences and then mischievously blame the same on the fundamental fact of their humanity. Were the preceding tenable or acceptable in civilized society and culture, there would be absolutely no need to organize and hold elections. It would then come down to simply taking up weapons and, literally, duking it out like a Darwinian state, where the bestial law of survival of the fittest is the norm.
If this is what Mr. Boateng-Gyan and the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress want Ghanaians to accept as our political reality, then, I am afraid, we are on the Road to Kigali. In other words, the NDC's National Organizer needs to further explain himself or be summarily expelled, if peace and quiet are to prevail in the country.
Attempting to patronize members and supporters of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), as the likes of Messrs. Ato Dadzie and Kofi Adams have been doing in the wake of the formal conclusion of the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court proceedings, would not save the fraudulently imposed Mahama government. In other words, is Mr. Boateng-Gyan also implying that any presidential election, past and present, in which an NDC flagbearer was declared winner by Dr. Afari-Gyan, since 1992, had, in fact, been a patent fraud?
And on the preceding score ought to be highlighted the fact that what was at stake in the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court hearings had far less to do with the mere occurrence of irregularities in Election 2012, than the criminally culpable fact of the electoral process having been deliberately rigged by Dr. Afari-Gyan and the Electoral Commission in favor of the default presidential incumbent. It is from this perspective that the evidentiary "smoking-gun" pink sheets and the prejudicial public comments by both Messrs. Dramani Mahama and Afari-Gyan ought to be envisaged.
Mr. Boateng-Gyan also needs to be soberly reminded of the fact that Ghanaians are not living in First-Century Jerusalem or Israel, but the Twenty-First Century global village of Biometric Voting Machines (BVMs).
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
July 19, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum
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