By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
At the Paul A. V. Ansah Memorial Lecture in Accra recently, Kenya's Prof. P. L. O. Lumumba was widely reported to have said that the incidence of having foreign citizens inordinately packed onto Ghana's Voters' Register was not unique to the latter country (See "Adulterated Voters' Roll Not Unique To Ghana - Prof. Lumumba" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/30/15). The Kenyan academician went on to cite the examples of his country's having had Tanzanians appear on its Voters' Register and vice-versa. As well, Prof Lumumba also noted that Kenyans have appeared on Uganda's Voters' Register.
Where I beg to vehemently disagree with the Director of the Kenya Law School is his reported assertion that having foreigners packed onto any African country's Voters' Register would not affect the outcome of an election in the country so victimized. Now, I find this kind of cynicism to be at once strange, dangerous and preposterous. In the case of Ghana, forensically revealed by the Bawumia-led team of experts belonging to the country's main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), a humongous 76,286 Togolese names were found to have been packed onto Ghana's Voters' Register in the lead-up to Election 2012.
The first most logical response to Prof. Lumumba is that 76,286 is a significant figure that made a heck of great difference in the outcome of Ghana's Election 2012; for the margin of votes separating the now-President John Dramani Mahama from his main and most formidable challenger was about 50,000 (Fifty-Thousand). Couple the preceding with the reported expunging of some 158,000 (One-Hundred-And-Fifty-Eight-Thousand) illegally registered people from our national Voters' Register, recently, by the Charlotte Osei-chaired Ghana Electoral Commission, and one begins to wonder whether the Kenyan Law School Director had not received a handsome payola from the Mahama government to use the solemn occasion of Prof. Ansah's Memorial Lecture as a propaganda spiel for the ruling National Democratic Congress.
For me, though, such posture, or stance, as assumed by the Kenyan opinion leader makes Prof. Lumumba integral to the sort of "non-thinking" African think-tanks that he so caustically lambasted in his presentation. We must also highlight the fact that acceptable electoral quality standards may not be necessarily the same for Kenya and Ghana, as well as for Uganda and Tanzania, the two other East African countries that Prof. Lumumba cited to justify such patent electoral illegality. We may also need to examine the differences in motivation behind the decision of the foreigners who deliberately and illegally allowed their names and other vital statistics to be packed onto Ghana's Voters' Register.
In the case of the Togolese citizens, the leader of the criminal Ghanaian syndicate that orchestrated such flagrant illegality, Mr. Robert Tetteyfio Adjase, has been widely quoted to have confessed that the executive operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress in the Ketu-South Constituency of the Volta Region delivered motorbikes and free access to Ghana's health insurance scheme as prime incentives to have these Togolese nationals prejudice the integrity of Ghana's Voters' Register. If the Kenyan Law School Director finds such repulsive illegality to be quite normal, and even ideal, then there is absolutely no reason to believe and accept his implicit self-description as a progressive African scholar and an intellectual.
Indeed, the method adopted by the Akufo-Addo-led main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) to draw the attention of the international community to the massive fraud that characterized Ghana's 2012 general election may not be the most logical approach, but it definitely serves as an unmistakable signal to the global community of what the NPP leaders and the Ghanaian opposition, in general, would be prepared to tolerate in the event of the country's 2016 general election's being fraudulently won by the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress. Needless to say, one would have logically expected Nana Akufo-Addo and his three-time running-mate, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, to have called on Ghana's Attorney-General and the country's Electoral Commissioner to launch an investigation into the allegedly massive fraud that was Election 2012.
But, of course, knowing what happened before the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel that adjudicated the 2012 Presidential-Election Petition, it comes as absolutely no surprise, whatsoever, that Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia would take their case or plead their all-too-legitimate cause before the international community. One also wishes that Prof. Lumumba had been more circumspect with his pronouncements on Ghana's fledgling, albeit robust and forward-looking, democratic culture.
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