Omission is no prohibition, Nii Ayikoi

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

I was toying with the caption of “The Superb Sophistry of Ayikoi Otoo” before I settled on the above caption of this column. This is in regard to the successful defense of the proprietor-presidential candidate of the so-called Progressive People’s Party (PPP), Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom by the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice. The PPP, as we all know, is a breakaway faction of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP), one of the several Nkrumaist splinter groups.

It is also quite certain that the decision by the Nungua native (if memory serves me accurately) to handle the Electoral Commission’s disqualification of the PPP’s proprietor and presidential candidate may have something to do with the apparently cordial relationship cultivated between the two men, when both Messrs. Ayikoi Otoo and Nduom served as cabinet appointees in the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

What was quite fascinating about the disqualification of Dr. Nduom by the Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei-led Electoral Commission (EC), is the fact that the EC appears to have been so narcissistically obsessed with its own claim to operational independence that it applied for the use of a Constitutional Instrument (CI) which conferred the Commission with discretionary powers vis-à-vis its dealings with all the legitimately registered political parties, without ensuring that Constitutional Instrument 94 (or CI 94) also provided rights and responsibilities for these political parties. In other words, it well appears that the EC sought to gratuitously hold political parties accountable for liabilities that had not been crafted and incorporated into CI 94.

In the process, it made the disqualification of the 13 political parties appear to be predicated on the whims and caprices of the key operatives of the EC, rather than its being logically based on the same constitutional framework that brought the EC into legitimate statutory existence. It is only when the entire scandal is viewed from this perspective that the much-touted gross incompetence of the EC’s Chair becomes indisputable.

Viewed through the foregoing logical lenses, it becomes limpidly evident, even as also eloquently observed by Mr. Ayikoi Otoo, that there was absolutely no means, legal or otherwise, by which any of the 13 disqualified largely splinter political parties could have been legitimately disqualified. In the main, the argument of the EC was that nearly every one of the disqualified presidential candidates of the 13 political parties had failed to garner the 432 signatures of legitimately registered voters required to affirm the integrity of their candidacy.

This is rather risible, if also because most of these 13 parties and their presidential candidates claim to have a national following reaching across all the 10 regions of the country. And so how these same 13 parties and their presidential nominees appear to have hit a snag in getting a relatively minuscule number of endorsers to affirm the legitimacy of their candidacy beats one’s imagination.

More so, in view of invariable reports indicating that many of the disqualified parties had collected the signatures of double registrants, or registered voters who appear to have willfully and criminally registered to vote in more than one constituency, against the legal requirements, and sometimes even in two different regions of the country.

Where the EC fell flat on its prats, or butts, as it were, regarded the fact that the Constitutional Instrument in question does not appear to make any provision or room for what to do in a situation where any of the endorsers of a presidential candidate is found to be criminally in breach of the law. The fact that the EC Chair has been touted as an accomplished legal light, by both the President and some of Mrs. Osei’s own colleagues and associates, makes one wonder about the level of knowledge it takes to practice law or manage a highly sensitive and legalistic institution like the EC in Ghana these days.

Likewise, if it is accurate that in nearly every one of the cases of the disqualified parties and their candidates the EC commissioners had not notified the concerned candidates of their errors and then permitted them to rectify such errors in a reasonable temporal frame, then it can be aptly concluded that the EC had deliberately acted in bad faith.

If the foregoing observation also has validity, then no well-meaning Ghanaian citizen can sit smug and comfortably going into the 2016 general election.

Writer's e-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net