Solomon Nkansah Got It All Wrong

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

He is a Deputy Propaganda Secretary for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), and so Mr. Solomon Nkansah has to be pardoned for his whole cloths of lies against the most formidable political opponent of his paymaster, President John Dramani Mahama. First of all, the Mahama go-fer claims that Nana Akufo-Addo did not win the Eastern Region in Election 2012; and then he almost immediately contradicts himself by claiming that Nana Akufo-Addo, after all, did win the vote in the Eastern Region, except that Mr. Mahama won more than 40-percent of the vote in the country's third most-populous region (See "A Man Who Couldn't Win His Home Region Cannot Be Prez - Solomon Nkansah" JoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/10/13).

For starters, there is no constitutional stipulation that any presidential candidate must win the vote in his/her home region in order to be elected president of the Democratic Republic of Ghana (DRG). Secondly, going by the argument of the key operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress, that the New Patriotic Party is an exclusively Akan party, it makes perfect forensic sense, as already proven before the Atuguba-presided panel of Supreme Court judges, that, indeed, the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party won the vote in at least all five Akan-dominated regions of Ghana, and possibly the Greater-Accra Region as well.

You see, the NDC has created this myth, based on their curious, albeit patently criminal, rigging of Election 2008 in favor of the now-late President John Evans Atta-Mills, that the latter's most formidable political opponent had clinched the ballots of only two regions in the country, which the key operatives of the NDC and their hirelings feel compelled to hold onto, if they are to get away with their electoral acts of criminality. Well, even assuming that Nana Akufo-Addo did win the ballot in only two regions of the country, that would still represent two-thirds of the three most significant regions of the country, which ought to be enough to convince any levelheaded citizen that, indeed, the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party is a formidable force to reckon with.

Fortunately for all well-meaning Ghanaians, and unfortunately for cynical NDC hacks like Mr. Nkansah, Mr. Philip Addison, counsel for the petitioners in the Election 2012 impasse, has been eloquently able to forensically prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that, indeed, it was Ghana's former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice who won the ballot of Election 2012, hands down, and that a clearly vindictive and vengeful Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the Electoral Commissioner, had viciously cooked the figures, and the books, in order to feloniously put Mr. Mahama on top.

What people like Mr. Nkansah ought to be doing is explaining to the Ghanaian public how, for instance, it came about that the main opposition New Patriotic Party could have won more than 120,000 votes than the National Democratic Congress at the parliamentary level, and yet ended up with some twenty parliamentary seats less than the NDC.

Indeed, if Nana Akufo-Addo failed to clinch the same margin of victory in the Eastern Region that President Mahama did clinch in his home region of the North, this is fundamentally because the Eastern Region has more ethnic diversity and better educated and more politically savvy inhabitants than the Northern Region, where voting is largely conducted more along the morally regressive lines of what is sociologically called the "herd-mentality." I thought Mr. Nkansah was smart enough to have recognized this rather elementary fact.

Indeed, Nana Akufo-Addo may not sport the most prepossessing personality profile, but he clearly comes off as the more politically mature and competent of the two major candidates of Election 2012. The fact also remains that the Supreme Court verdict on last December's presidential election would, hopefully, be squarely based on the strength of the evidence presented and forensically proven, and not on the wishfully chimerical imagination of some pathologically criminal megalomaniacs hell-bent on hanging onto power for as long as peace-loving and longsuffering Ghanaians would allow them.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
August 11, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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