By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Oct. 29, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

If memory serves me accurately, in the wake of the infantile and cowardly boycotting of the Institute of Economic Affairs-sponsored forum on the bloated National Voters’ Register, Mr. Koku Anyidoho was widely reported to have said that even many Ghanaian Christians routinely break their New Year’s resolutions. What this means, of course, is that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) is not operated by serious Ghanaian citizens. For it goes without that the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is indisputably one of the most significant and progressive think tanks in the country.

In the recent past, the IEA has hosted the Presidential Candidates’ Debates. In mischievously opting not to participate in the Voters’ Register Debate, the ruling party’s operatives claimed that the IEA was usurping the authority of the Charlotte Osei-headed Electoral Commission (EC) to conducting such an exercise (See “Voters’ Register Debate: NDC Must Grow Up – IEA” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/21/15). Which prompted Mrs. Jean Mensah, the Executive Director of the IEA, to bitterly complain that the infantile politics of expediency stance adopted by the operatives of the ruling party was undermining the onward march and salutary enhancement of Ghanaian democratic praxis.

The fact of the matter, though, is that the Electoral Commission is not constitutionally mandated to organize and/or host periodic forums to debate issues related to the integrity, or the lack thereof, of the Voters’ Register. In most advanced democracies, such as the United States, Canada and Britain, that civil role is largely the preserve of think tanks. But it could also be organized and/or hosted by large media networks like CNN, CBS, NBC, FOX News and newspapers of record like the Washington Post and the New York Times. It clearly looks as if the leaders of the National Democratic Congress are hoping to influence the EC, with an obvious view to having Commissioner Osei unduly tilt the 2016 ballot in their favor. Fat chance!

In all likelihood, Mrs. Osei, a far better qualified personality for the job than her predecessor, is highly unlikely to do an “Afari-Gyan.” And on the latter note ought to be quickly pointed out that the mere fact of the former University of Ghana political science lecturer’s having supervised two consecutive elections that favored the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP), has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Dr. Afari-Gyan’s having conducted free and fair elections. If that had been the case, Ghanaians would not have had the three-time NDC presidential candidate, Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, late, bitterly complain that Elections 2000 and 2004 were the most fraudulent of their kind in the country’s history. By 2008, the NDC’s so-called King-of-Peace would be vowing to plunge Ghana into a Kenya type apocalypse, if his former colleague and classmate, from their Legon days, made the inexcusable mistake of calling the election in favor of his most formidable political opponent, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Dr. Afari-Gyan would do precisely as Prof. Atta-Mills had ordered.

And so it hardly came as a surprise that President Mahama would host a lavish send-off party for the man who told the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel that adjudicated the 2012 Presidential-Election Petition that he did not know what constituted “over-voting.” Of course, going by the preceding logic, Dr. Afari-Gyan could also not be called upon by the same apex court to define and/or explain what constituted “under-voting.” In other words, for most of the twenty-odd years that he served as the country’s Chief Returning Officer, Dr. Afari-Gyan was literally asleep at the wheel. The irony here, though, is that at about the same time that he was flagrantly playing fast-and-loose with the destiny of the Ghanaian people, Dr. Afari-Gyan was being rapturously commended for being the foremost election expert on the African continent. And, needless to say, that is not really saying much.

As an ardent Nkrumacrat, not much, by way of free and fair elections, could be expected of the notorious chain-smoking inebriate, as some of his most ardent critics prefer to describe Dr. Afari-Gyan. Mrs. Mensah, of the IEA, would have key NDC players like Messrs. Asiedu-Nketia, Anyidoho and Adams sober up and facilitate the rapid and timely development of Ghanaian democracy. But, of course, it all depends on whether these hardnosed party machinists fully appreciate what it really means to conduct free and fair elections in a fledgling democratic culture such as ours, presently.