Change Of Voters' Register Still Vanquished Togolese Opposition

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 19, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I would like to believe the editorial writer of Freddie Blay's Daily Guide newspaper that the mere scrapping of the current Voters' Register and replacing the same with a new one would do the trick, as it were, for the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). But I am afraid to confess that it would not (See "Poignant, Revealing (1)" Modernghana.com 8/19/15). Those who have followed my writings on the various Ghanaian media websites over the course of the last twenty years - I have actually been engaged in global Black media activism for some thirty years - are fully aware of the fact that I am absolutely no apologist for the bloody leftist ruling National Democratic Congress, and could never be under any circumstances.

My concern here is to enable the key operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) realize the fact that merely agitating for a new Voters' Register is the most facile and laziest method of fighting electoral corruption and poll-rigging in the country. The best and most efficient method is the auditing approach taken by the Bawumia-led team of the New Patriotic Party. The next step, as I suggested in a previous article on the subject, is to cast the auditing net all across the Volta Region, and then the towns and regions bordering Ghana's two other neighbors, namely, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast. The ancient bonds of history, good neighborliness and ECOWAS familial kinship ought to smoothly facilitate the securing of copies of the Voters' Registers of these two countries for strictly forensic-auditing purposes.

The third step would be for Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia and his team of forensic experts to ferret the current Voters' Register for registered voters who may have been illegally registered to vote in the 2012 general election due to the fact of their being less that 18 years old at the time. This process can be made simple by maximizing the involvement of local party executives and the so-called footsoldiers who should know the ages of their neighbors and relatives. This, of course, should be aided by the use of local school anrollment registers as well as church registers. It is a lot of work, but it is far more productive than simply calling for the establishment of a new Voters' Register, which is likely to produce the essentially the same tainted results in Election 2016, unless the culprits of the present Voters' Register's contamination are identified, brought up on forensically sustainable charges in a criminal court and promptly and severely punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Once the foregoing measure of deterrence has been activated, then can anybody begin to productively and intelligently talk about the establishment of a new Voters' Register. I am quite certain that Nana Akufo-Addo and Dr. Bawumia have a strong case in calling for the establishment of a new Voters' Register, but this can best be done by these two gentlemen heading for court, once again, and making such case on the strength of their latest apparently foolproof pieces of evidence. Such judicial petition must also be crafted as a criminal case, with the culprits, as clearly identified, being subjected to stiff penalties. This means that petitioning the Wood Supreme Court is totally out of the question. In short, this case must be filed with the Fast-Track High Court to ensure the timely ministration of justice.

The preceding, of course, involves a lot of cranial exertion and capital resources, but it is about the best and most effective antidote to the sort of sophisticated Mafia-like network established and criminally encoded into our current electoral culture by some presumable key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress and their collaborators at the Electoral Commission. Let us at least for now, forget about citing the patently irrelevant case of the re-establishment of a new Voters' Register in Togo, just this past March, at the instance and insistence of that country's opposition political parties, with the ex-officio involvement of President Mahama, then-Chairman of the ECOWAS. Mr. Mahama's involvement and all, the fact still remains that the Togolese opposition significantly lost the election to their dynastic leader, President Faure Eyadema. We don't want to take such primrose, or facilely destructive route, or do we. Ladies and Gentlemen, you just think about it!

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