By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 30, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Following the dismissal of two male employees of the so-called Independent Electoral Commission (EC) in the Walewale district of the Northern Region, it has come to light that the two men were fired by EC Chair Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei for reasons that appear to be purely partisan and may have absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to do with the alleged misdeed of these EC employees (See “I Was Never Verified in My Family House – Dr. Bawumia” Ultimatefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/30/16).

The target of the EC-NDC collaborative shenanigans, to wit, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the three-time presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), has been speaking to reporters about what actually transpired vis-à-vis the widely reported incident that resulted in the summary dismissal of Messrs. Jobey Ambrose and Mumuni Latiffah from their EC jobs. Dr. Bawumia has confirmed that, indeed, the two men had visited his Kperiga family house to get him to verify his voters’ register particulars, in a routine show of common courtesy, only to be met with the absence of the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana.

In plain language, Dr. Bawumia never got to verify his electoral register’s particulars in his family house because Nana Akufo-Addo’s running-mate had traveled out of town to attend the funeral of the late Nasia Chief of Nalerigu. He would shortly return and be told by members of his household that Messrs. Ambrose and Latiffa had come looking for him and had just left the house; and also that their mission had been to get him to verify his voters’ register particulars.

Needless to say, the foregoing account does not in any way exculpate the two men from being guilty of breaching EC regulations or standing orders, whatever be the case. Nevertheless, even as I pointed out in a previous article, if this happens to be a routine practice by way of extending common courtesy to prominent local figures in the form of saving them the trouble of queuing up on long lines to have their voters’ register particulars verified, then it clearly stands to reason that Messrs. Ambrose and Latiffa were merely following established precedence when they visited the Bawumia family house to have the 2016 NPP’s vice-presidential candidate verify his electoral particulars.

Consequently, making an obviously partisan exception of Dr. Bawumia does not stand to reason. Indeed, the EC Chair would be better off walking back her patently criminal deception of the Wood Supreme Court than stabbing at crepuscular shadows. Indeed, even as I write, reliable testimonies are coming to light indicating that Mrs. Osei may have perjured herself before the Supreme Court, when she submitted a niggardly list of some 56,000 names and claimed the same to be the total number of people who had registered to vote by the use of their National Health Insurance Scheme-issued cards in the lead-up to the 2012 general election.

In his personal account of this issue, Alhaji Bawumia noted that the Kperiga Polling Center is a stone’s throw from his family house and therefore he would not have had to walk very far to have his voting particulars verified. He also adds that he had actually met Messrs. Ambrose and Latiffa halfway on their way back to the Kpreiga Polling Center, where the two dismissed men decided to help him verify his voting particulars as part of the ongoing voters’ register exhibition exercise being undertaken by the EC. In other words, the location of Dr. Bawumia’s electoral verification was within the threshold of the Kperiga Polling Center.
The 2016 New Patriotic Party’s presidential candidate has also dismissed claims that he had offered Messrs. Ambrose and Latiffa the whopping payola sum of GH? 5,000 apiece to have the two men carry the Biometric Voting Machine into his family house. In a press statement signed by Mr. Simon Ali, the Walewale New Patriotic Party’s constituency secretary, the Simon Fraser University doctoral degree holder riposted thusly: “This is hallucination of the highest order.” He went on to observe that it did not gibe with common sense for him to have paid GH? 10,000 for a verification process that was totally free of charge.

Indeed, as noted by this writer in a previous article, this incident needs to be promptly and thoroughly investigated and justice done to Messrs. Ambrose and Latiffa. If I really believed that she possessed any remarkable modicum of moral and professional integrity, I would have personally called on the EC Chair to issue a public apology and to promptly reinstate Messrs. Ambrose and Latiffa to their EC jobs.

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