By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Oct. 25, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
No single individual Ghanaian citizen, irrespective of political status or influence, has a right to dictate to another individual or any group of individuals and/or professionals how they should, or ought, to respond to issues bordering on the destiny of our country. I therefore read Mr. Kwaku Boahen’s warning to members of the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG) to desist from publicly commenting on the raging debate on the Voters’ Register with all the contempt that it rightly deserves (See “NDC Communications Director Warns Clergy to Stay off Voters’ Register Debate” MyJoyOnline.com 10/17/15). I find his warning to be extremely offensive because Mr. Boahen is the deputy communications director of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), a political organization with the most violent track-record in postcolonial Ghanaian history.
Mr. Boahen also needs to be reminded and/or educated about the fact that the Electoral Commission (EC) does not exist in a political and/or functional vacuum. Rather, the EC was created to work for the interest and benefit of all Ghanaians. If as citizens of the country, the executive members of the Christian Council of Ghana strongly believe that the current Voters’ Register leaves much to be desired, then these hardworking, intelligent and distinguished Ghanaians have every right to make their concerns publicly known to the rest of the country, most of all, to the senior staff and administrators of the Electoral Commission. To be certain, being members of the clergy makes these Christian religious leaders more intimately attuned to the national pulse, vis-à-vis the attitude of the general Ghanaian public towards the credibility, or the lack thereof, for that matter, of the current National Voters’ Register.
It is also absurd for the NDC’s deputy communications director to claim that the Christian Council of Ghana does not have the power to appoint a President in Ghana. For starters, Mr. Boahen exhibits inexcusable ignorance to presume the primary function of the Voters’ Register to be about the election of the President of Ghana. Then also, the NDC apparatchik needs to take a scientific count of the percentage of Christians who routinely vote in the country’s elections, at all levels, before making such a nitwit comment. Then also, who said that anybody really cares about the stance of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress to the ongoing debate on the credibility of the Voters’ Register, besides members, supporters and sympathizers of the party? Not even the majority of the members of the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel that decided the Election 2012 presidency in favor of the NDC believed in the inviolable integrity of the current Voters’ Register. And so who is this rascal to tell Ghanaians what to think about their Voters’ Register, least of all the members of the Christian Council, almost all of whose executive operatives are far better educated and morally enlightened than Mr. Boahen?
Again, what is the relevance of Mr. Boahen’s reminding members of the general public that it was the Electoral Commission that organized and supervised the respective elections of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor? Whoever said that the polling processes that elected Messrs. Rawlings and Kufuor were deemed to be perfect or free and fair by all Ghanaians? Has Mr. Boahen ever heard of Prof. Adu A. Boahen, late, and the Stolen Verdict document? Did the NDC communications second-bananas also not hear then-former Vice-President John Evans Atta-Mills bitterly and incessantly impugn the integrity of Elections 2000 and 2004? And so why is this congenital mischief-maker pretending that all has been deemed to be hunky-dory with our National Voters’ Register since the beginning of the country’s Fourth Republic?
Instead of crudely and unwisely taking pot-shots at the clergy, especially members of the Christian Council of Ghana, Mr. Boahen would do himself a lot of good by thanking political wet-blankets like Rev.-Prof. Emmanuel Asante, head of the so-called National Peace Council, for so courageously, albeit annoyingly, slamming the brakes on a volatile post-2012 election climate that could have easily degenerated into a civil strife of Rwandan proportions.
