Jarreth Merz's Movie: An African Elections

Addressing the Flaws of Organizing Elections in Africa;

After watching Jarreth Merz’s internationally acclaimed movie, An African

Election, and all the commentary and interviews about it, I realized how close we

were to violence in 2008 presidential and parliamentary

elections. One interview that caught my attention was the one conducted

by Paul Adom Otchere of Metro TV. The interviewer made a lot out of

having cameras in the EC strong room and I ask myself: What’s the fuss

about having cameras in the EC strong room?

Jarreth Merz did a great job by filming the EC strong room during the 2008

elections for his acclaimed movie; “An African Election”.

That’s the way to go if we are to ensure transparency and fairness in our

Electoral process. Cameras should be installed in all corners of the EC

Strong Room to capture every action that goes on there during the

tabulation of election results.

You see I have always said that our journalists whether in the print media

or the electronic media are at the bottom of the pack. We have TV

stations, and numerous radio stations in Ghana but they don’t do any

original and creative work worthy of the name that can receive critical

acclaim. They sit on their lazy and incompetent asses and show only

copyrighted materials, hip-hop songs and azonto dancing, “charlatans”

who call themselves pastors and their cacophonous noise making called

preaching all day and night. The hosts of their numerous so called

political discussion programmes are arrogant, rude, and disrespectful,

they have no ethics and they contribute to the crap and insults on the

airwaves everyday, but these same incompetent souls got the audacity to

question Merz for making a movie about Ghana’s elections.

Why didn’t MetroTV or whatever it calls itself make a documentary about the

Elections and document it for posterity given how pivotal the 2008

elections were in the annals of Ghana’s history?

Merz has done a great job by documenting democracy in Ghana. His movie has

received international acclamation, he has done a great PR work about it including a

talk about it on TED.com and has been interviewed by numerous media houses abroad

and at home.

This movie shows the world Ghana went to the brink in the 2008 elections but we were

able to pull ourselves back. The people decided the fate of Ghana, it wasn’t left to

the Supreme Court to decide even though Atta

Akyea and co. conspired with the Chief Justice to overturn the people’s

will. Ghana had its own Florida 2000 moment but we excelled and did

better than even the United States. The people of Tain decided the

elections not a hurriedly convened Supreme Court anywhere.

The Electoral Commission and its Commissioner Afari-Gyan must be decisive,

strong, independent and fair even in the face of intimidation. By the

powers invested in him as the Electoral Commissioner, he can throw out

results from any constituency where the turn out exceeds 100% of the

registered voters in that particular constituency. It goes without

saying that any constituency that returns an election results exceeding

100% of the voter turnout of the registered voters in that constituency

must have the results nullified and thrown out. THIS IS COMMON SENSE.

In an election it is impossible to have 100% voter turnout in any

constituency. No way. Chances are none, zero, zip, nil, nada. Having a

90% turn out is a near impossible feat. Some people might have passed

away since the last elections and the last voter registration exercise,

some may have moved out of the community, others owing to ill health or

other commitments may decide not to vote, so 100% voter turnout is

impossible let alone the ridiculous situation of having more people than the number

of registered voters in that constituency vote. That is

fraudulent and must be rejected right away.

If the EC’s Afari-Gyan cannot be firm on this he must resign or be made to step

aside. As we go into Election 2012, all stake holders must agree

to play by the rules, and the EC must enforce those rules without fear

or favour. This is how one observer put it:

“After watching the trailer of the documentary on the 2008 elections, and

hearing Afari-Gyan’s comment that there is no African election in which

one side has not alleged cheating by the other, I have been wondering

whether the time has not come for him to retire or be retired.

I wonder whether he realized that his position that ‘once the ballot gets into the

ballot box it will be counted’ lies at the root of his own

observation. It is a fact that there will always be some unlawful votes

in all elections. But to get to the situation where voter-turnout

exceeds 100% – that is more people voted than registered – takes the

crown. If he had any spine, he would have rejected the vote count from

all constituents where the results showed up a voter turnout in excess

of 100%. But he accepted results which showed voter turnout of even

139%!! He might not have been responsible for the 139% voter turnout,

but by accepting such a result he was certainly nurturing potential

electoral violence. By Afari-Gyan’s logic, we could soon have election

results that show 200% voter turnout, provided the votes are in the

ballot box!

That the violence did not occur was not due to any divine intervention. It

was simply because the NDC felt that even if they won by one single vote they had

won: ALL-WIN-BE-WIN!!!. Was that not the case, we would be

singing a different song right now.”

The current government’s lack of action in investigating the electoral

malpractices that occurred in 2008 with a mind to fixing it so they

don’t show up again in 2012 is worrying to say the least. A friend of

mine recently remarked “It’s been 4yrs now and the government has done

nothing about all the anomalies that took place during the 2008

elections.

It has been very irresponsible and reckless on the part of the government

not to had instituted some inquiry to address these issues and has

allowed this time-bomb to keep ticking to 2012.Some people were

determined to plunge this country into violence but since the government came into

power we have heard nothing about these anomalies which

nearly sent us over the cliff.”

That’s the crux of the matter. No effort has been made to investigate and

punish wrongdoing. So here we go again. Another election year and we are all sitting

on thorns not knowing what went wrong last time that

brought us so close to violence and how to avoid it this time.

The ELECTORAL COMMISSION’S STRONG ROOM MUST HAVE CAMERAS IN ALL CORNERS THAT SHOULD

RECORD EVERY THING GOING ON THERE.

No telephones must be allowed in the EC strong room. People who go there

to transact business must know that their every move is being monitored

and recorded. People in there must be cut off from the outside world. If phones are

brought in they must be bugged, immobilized or all phone

conversations recorded. If we do this we can make our elections more and more

transparent and the rest of Africa and the world will look up to

us for inspiration. They are a lot of things we can do to make the

outcome of our elections more credible and also to make the elections

itself more transparent , and free from violence and fair to all parties taking part.

Ben Ofosu-Appiah,

Tokyo, JAPAN.

The author is a policy strategist, and a social and political analyst based in

Tokyo, Japan. He welcomes your comments. He can be reached at ; do4luv27@yahoo.com