Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 19, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I don’t know who put this farcical notion out there that there was ever any such thing as “Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana.” And so I was quite amused to come across an article in which Mr. Koku Anyidoho, the Deputy General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was virulently accusing the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, of playing fast-and-loose with the facts surrounding the integrity, or the lack thereof, of the country’s current voters’ register (See “So Bawumia Lied About the Togolese Voters Register? Hmmm!!!”

Well, the stark fact of the matter is that it was, indeed, then-Transitional Prime Minister Nkrumah who led the erstwhile Gold Coast, renamed Ghana on March 6, 1957, to independence. But the political processes that culminated in the declaration of Ghana as a sovereign nation-state was not the handiwork of any one person. For one, the name Ghana was not the idea of Mr. Nkrumah but Dr. Danquah. In fact, it is precisely because of the all-too-apt recognition of the process of independence as a collective effort that we have that group of leaders widely known and acclaimed as The Big Six.

I am also well aware of the fact of Mr. Anyidoho’s own uncle, the late Prof. Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor, having penned and published his own version of what he claimed to be the authentic history of Ghana, in which the pathologically ethnocentric writer sought, unconvincingly, to downplay the central role of great thinkers and activists like Dr. J. B. Danquah, while hyperbolically seeking to elevate the stature and status of his own uncle, Mr. Awooner-Renner, or some such personality. Mr. Anyidoho’s deliberate misspelling of the name of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia and its unmistakably arrogant implications are not lost on the critically thinking reader. I suppose it is part and parcel of his dastardly attempt to seriously undermine the credibility, integrity and stature of the Oxbridge-educated former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana.

Predictably, the former Communications Director of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills fails royally in the attempt. At best, Mr. Anyidoho makes the level-headed Ghanaian citizen conscious of the imperative need to ferreting out and poignantly exposing the collusive shenanigans between the leaders of the ruling National Democratic Congress and the Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei-led so-called Independent Electoral Commission (EC). For starters, absolutely nobody has provided any evidence, let alone a convincing one, to contradict Dr. Bawumia’s well-researched fact of Ghana’s voters’ register having been criminally packed with the names and vital statistics of Togolese nationals, among a remarkable number of other foreign nationals. The critic would also do himself and like-minded people great good by reviewing the reaction that greeted Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome’s Epic Heist before presuming to point fingers at those who are supposed to be alienating Anlo-Ewes from Ghanaian citizenship.

And so it is anybody’s good guess how Mr. Anyidoho reached the rather bizarre conclusion that the 2016 New Patriotic Party’s Vice-Presidential Candidate was peddling a whole fabric of mendacity, when Dr. Bawumia and his team of crackerjack technical experts published convincing evidence that, indeed, the country’s voters’ register was heavily compromised with the names of foreign nationals, a shocking discovery that prompted Nana Akufo-Addo, the NPP’s Presidential Candidate, to remonstratively declare that Ghanaians were not interested in using an ECOWAS voters’ register in the conduct of their local elections. We must also highlight the strategically equivocal response offered by Mrs. Charlotte Osei, the Electoral Commissioner, to the effect that the EC Chairperson had not been successful in convincing her Togolese counterparts to release the necessary corroborative evidence to enable her and her staff ascertain the veracity of Team Bawumia’s forensically convincing evidence.

I bet any person who reasons scandalously like Mr. Anyidoho is also apt to insist that the forensically proven evidence of “over-voting” has never occurred in Ghana’s Fourth Republic. Indeed, Mr. Anyidoho would be grossly mistaken if he thinks that Ghanaians are, somehow, too daft and naïve to see through the veritable hoax that is the 56,000 NHIS-registered voters insolently presented to the Wood Supreme Court by the unabashedly “anti-elitist” EC Chair. We shall have more to discuss on this subject as the occasion calls for the same.

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