Funny Man, This Asiedu-Nketia

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

Initially, their strategy was to delay and prolong the 2012 presidential election petition for as long as possible, in order to ensure that their fraudulently declared winner and Caretaker President of the Democratic Republic of Ghana served out an undeserved four-year term. And so some of their paid propagandists were even taunting the petitioners to demand a review of the parliamentary election as well.

It is also for this reason that the key operatives of the Third Respondent, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), blindly engaged the dubious services of Mr. Tsatsu "The Thief" Tsikata, notorious master of delay tactics and the man whose service as counsel to his cousin Capt. (Rt) Kojo Tsikata and Chairman Rawlings may well have culminated in the brutal abduction and Mafia-style summary execution of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges. And here ought to also be promptly recalled the fact that Capt. Tsikata was the National Security Adviser to Chairman Rawlings and his co-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) on June 30, 1982, when Justices Koranteng-Addow, Sarkodie and Agyepong were selectively assassinated.

Now the man popularly called General Mosquito is blaming the petitioners for unduly delaying judicial proceedings so as to harry and distract the Mahama government from studiously discharging the obligations for which the National Democratic Congress has, supposedly, been mandated by the Ghanaian electorate (See "Uncertainty Hangs Over Mahama - Asiedu-Nketia" Daily Guide/Ghanaweb.com 7/15/13). The fact of the matter is that the NDC has not been mandated by the Ghanaian electorate; that is, not until the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel of nine jurists hands down its definitive decision on Thursday, August 29, 2013.

For those of our readers who may not know them, the eight other members of the Atuguba panel are, namely, Justices Julius Ansah, Sophia Adinyira, Constance Rose Owusu, Jones Dotse, Anin Yeboah, Paul Baffoe-Bonnie, N. S. Gbadegbe and Vida Akoto-Bamfo. That the hearings have taken eight months, or two-thirds of a year, to conclude ought to serve as prime signal to Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the general-secretary of the National Democratic Congress, that it has far more merit and substance than his boss, President John Dramani Mahama, was willing to initially admit.

Mr. Asiedu-Nketia's complaint appears to have bordered on the legitimate demand by counsel for the petitioners, Mr. Philip Addison, for the auditors of the celebrated pink sheets, KPMG, to conduct a fuller and thorough auditing beyond the 8,675 officially submitted to the Court. According to the petitioners, with the significant approbation of the Atuguba-presided court, 1,545 polling stations had been discounted by KPMG whose personnel evidently found the 8,675 polling-station count submitted to the Court to be statistically and forensically adequate to establish the substance of the case.

The irony here, though, is that Mr. Tsikata, the convicted Oxbridge-schooled lawyer for the Asiedu-Nketia gang, had insisted, rather mischievously, that the evidentiary pink sheets submitted by Nana Akufo-Addo and his associates fell far short of the 12,000-plus initially announced to the Court and acknowledged as such and admitted into evidence by the aforesaid Court. Now, having been resoundingly trounced at their own game, the Asiedu-Nketia gang is conveniently claiming that Mr. Addison and his clients are deliberately dragging out the case, thereby seriously impugning the credibility of Mr. Mahama. General Mosquito clearly appears to be in a daze.

Needless to say, the Asiedu-Nketia gang ought to have given the credibility of their boss some serious thought before recklessly and criminally resorting to their collusive ballot-rigging scam with Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the disgraced and criminally minded Electoral Commissioner. That President Mahama, like Shakespeare's MacBeth, is living in borrowed robes and shall in time be stripped to the loins cannot be gainsaid. The man is so pathetically confused that recently, after telling Mr. Kwaku Sintim-Misa, the radio and television personality, that the election petition hearings gave him no midnight situps, or nightmares, bitterly complained to the larger Ghanaian public that, indeed, the hearings were significantly impacting the development of the nation.

I bet my proverbial bottom-dollar that Mr. Mahama can't wait to be auspiciously relieved of his clearly oversized job, come August 29, 2013!

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
August 23, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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