Forget About January 7, Mr. Kufuor; Reschedule Your Handover!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

We are deeply amazed, but hardly surprised, that President J. A. Kufuor would issue a statement seeking to flagrantly interfere with justice and the rule of law under Ghana’s fledgling democratic culture. The lame-duck president is, indeed, quite right that many of us Ghanaians, resident both at home and abroad, had our Yuletide and New Year festivities effectively marred by the raging presidential run-off impasse.


It is quite obvious to Ghanaian citizens who have studiously followed Mr. Kufuor’s un-statesmanlike activities and wrong-headed and outright sophomoric policies, deliberately directed against the political fortunes of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) that put him in the seat of power for two electoral terms, that the outgoing premier is, so far, very pleased with the political crisis that he has almost single-handedly created.


Make no mistake, Ghanaians are in no way, whatsoever, fooled by the President’s rather cavalier and dubious attempt to hurriedly slink himself out the fetid and lurid mess that he has willfully created, largely out of his quite well-known and personal antipathy towards Nana Akufo-Addo, presidential candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party.


We have also traumatically witnessed the President’s very public, if also incredibly crude, attempts to turn the Ghanaian electorate against the personality of Nana Akufo-Addo by, for instance, drawing up an Honors Roll of Ghanaians deserving of national recognition for their illustrious and distinguished contributions to our national development, with such gut-wrenching names as Capt. Kojo Tsikata, Messrs. Atta-Mills and Rawlings topping the list, and Nana Akufo-Addo’s name nowhere to be found on the same list!


What is even more un-statesmanlike, was to see and hear Mr. Kufuor exuberantly and heartily chatting with journalists about his new job on the board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on voting day, when the Pesident was expected to be expressing great confidence in the chances of his party becoming victorious at the polls and healthily continuing with the putatively progressive activities initiated and executed by both Mr. Kufuor and the New Patriotic Party at large.

We also, of course, witnessed the President’s rather jaw-dropping and gross irresponsibility in callously implementing programs and policies that were unmistakably apt to jeopardize the Akufo-Addo campaign, such as the ill-timed purchasing of the two presidential jets in an election that was also dominated by news of the global economic crunch. It was thus nothing short of the outright miraculous that the former Justice and Foreign minister would do even slightly better than Mr. Kufuor, himself, did in the first round of Election 2000, in the just-concluded 2008 general election of December 7.


Indeed, it would hardly come as worthwhile news if we wake up tomorrow to learn from the Electoral Commission’s Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan that Mr. Kufuor actually voted for Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC).


As for his rather cavalier statement exhorting the parties involved in the ongoing electoral fraud, to which President Kufuor contributed in no small part, allowing the Electoral Commissioner to criminally validate the same, by implicitly declaring Prof. Atta-Mills as the winner of Election 2008, we have the Yar’Adua (or Nigerian) example to guide us. To be certain, about the only valid aspect of the 2008 presidential election is round one, during which event Nana Akufo-Addo effectively trounced Prof. Atta-Mills by 49% to 47% of the votes cast. Thus in the worst case scenario, what Dr. Afari-Gyan could plausibly and also, perhaps, legitimately do would be to declare the New Patriotic Party candidate President-Elect of Ghana, while the Electoral Commission sorts things out with the parties involved if, in fact, in the patently flawed and downright disingenuous imagination of Mr. Kufuor, time is of the essence, vis-à-vis the constitutionally stipulated handover date of January 7, 2009.


The travesty, needless to say, would be for Dr. Afari-Gyan to spuriously declare the former vice-president and perennial presidential candidate of the NDC President-Elect, when more than 50,000 registered Ghanaian voters, in the Tain Constituency, of the Brong-Ahafo Region, have yet to vote.


In the event of the imperative need to averting a constitutional crisis, as the outgoing President Kufuor apparently believes, the latter could promptly call an emergency session of the last parliament in order to reschedule the constitutionally stipulated presidential handover date. This could be anywhere from six months to a year.

Obviously, this anomalous state of affairs would also imply that Mr. Kufuor put his new IMF job on an indefinite hold, even as our hatchet man helps the Electoral Commission and the Ghanaian electorate, at large, clean up the shameful mess that Uncle Kofi Diawuo almost single-handedly wrought.


Ultimately, attempting to vacuously blame the Ghanaian media for merely detailing and promptly disseminating the looming constitutional crisis that Mr. Kufuor has created would not wash. If, indeed, he were a conscientious Ghanaian citizen, the President would already have embarked on a program and process of genuine penance, by begging his palpably shortchanged countrymen and women for forgiveness, for curiously bequeathing them with an at once lurid and repugnant legacy of a constitutional crisis. Still, what the President ought to be worrying about right now, is the possible outbreak of an unprecedented civic mayhem. By all means, Uncle Diawuo, Happy New Year!


*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 18 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” and “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana.” E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###