Not your judgment call, General Mosquito!

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

Garden City, New York

August 3, 2016

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The morbidly desperate leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has begun their red-herring games again, exposing themselves for what many of us avid students of Fourth-Republican Ghanaian political culture have maintained for quite a while now. To wit, that the National Democratic Congress’ leadership is in cahoots with their surrogates at the so-called Independent Electoral Commission (EC) to rig Election 2016, if the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) fails to keep an eagle-eyed perspective on the upcoming polls. The latest game by the Asiedu-Nketia Gang has been to taunt Team Bawumia to submit the names of the 76,286 foreigners that the latter claimed had been illegally tacked onto Ghana’s National Voters’ Register (NVR) – (See “Submit 76K Togolese Names for Deletion – NDC Dares NPP” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/3/16).

You see, what we ought to be discussing presently is the criminally culpable malpractice of “over-voting,” which is widely known to be more rampant in the Volta Region than any of the ten regions of the country. I have said this several times in quite a slew of columns, that what we need to be doing from now until the December 7 general election is to ensure that no constituency returns polling numbers far in excess of 35,000 or thereabouts, in accordance with the constitutional stipulation that the maximum number of people that any parliamentarian may represent ought not to be far in excess of 50,000. What I have not been able to ascertain is whether the figure of 50,000 is entirely composed of voting-eligible adults or a combination of voting-age adults and minors. Which, at any rate would make the promises of parliamentary representatives like Mr. Fiifi Kwetey to deliver a minimum of 100,000 votes for the National Democratic Congress indisputably suspicious.

As for the lame and jaded challenge for Team Bawumia to make good on its alleged discovery of some 76,000-plus foreigners on our National Voters’ Register, that judgment call entirely belongs to the key operatives of the Electoral Commission. Indeed, I vividly remember that at the time that such discovery was allegedly made, the then-newly appointed EC Chair, Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, told the nation that all attempts to authentic, or rather verify, the findings of Team Bawumia from the Togolese election authorities had met with prompt rebuff. But there was also quite a tricky aspect to this matter because the Electoral Commission had adamantly refused to grant full access to Ghana’s National Voters’ Register, about the same time that the EC operatives were demanding copies of Team Bawumia’s allegedly forensically sustainable evidence vis-à-vis the purportedly irreparable contamination or compromising of the NVR. And, needless to say, Team Bawumia was squarely with its rights to refuse to provide copies of its finds to the EC, while it had practically no way of determining whether its copies would be covertly used to purge or sanitize the existing voters’ register, only for the EC’s operatives to turn around and accuse Team Bawumia of taking the country on a wild-goose chase.

The EC leaders would later appear with some dubious narrative claiming that Team Bawumia’s purported evidence was not authentic, after all; and that the composition of Ghana’s NVR was such that no foreign register of names and photographs could be successfully scanned onto Ghana’s NVR, or some such curious narrative, as yours truly vividly recalls the same. Ultimately, what all democracy-loving Ghanaians ought to be worried about is the quite reliable testimony by Mr. Sydney Casely-Hayford, the renowned and respected financial analyst, that there may be a significant number of eligible voters who voted by the use of their recently proscribed National Health Insurance Scheme-issued cards whose names have still not been expunged from the NVR, including himself, as ordered by the Supreme Court in the Ramadan-Nimako Vs. the Electoral Commission. In essence, Ghanaians have a lot to be worried about since, figuratively speaking, we are still not out of the woods yet.

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