Can’t Read, Can’t Run – As Simple as That!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 11, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]

The disqualification of the presidential candidates of some 12 splinter political parties – as of this writing, the number had inched up to 13 – with barely two months to the December 7 general election, ought to stand at all costs. No court should step in to reverse the decision of the Electoral Commission’s Chair Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei (See “Disqualified Aspirants Were Given Time to Rectify Errors – EC” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/11/16). The decision is healthy for several reasons, not the least of which regards a fraught contest arena. As a young and still growing democracy, the need for our electoral system not to be cluttered with the sort of “Makaranta” or cancerous and fissiparous multiplicity of one-man and one-woman proprietary political parties is a prerequisite to avoiding the sort of electoral shenanigans, such as the near-ubiquitous incidence of over-voting, that have characterized our Fourth-Republican democratic culture over the past 24 years.

The abject lack of political and electoral discipline, for the most part, is primarily to blame for the persistence of the establishment of national voters’ registers whose credibility and integrity continue to be hotly contested. With the beneficent paring down of the number of key players in the political arena to only the numerically most significant and viable, the credibility and integrity of both our national voters’ register can only be expected to have been logically enhanced. For what is remarkable about the basis of the latest disqualification of the 12, or 13, presidential candidates, as publicly noted by Mr. Amadu Sulley, the Deputy EC Chair in charge of Operations, squarely has to do with the untenably amateurish clerical manner in which most of the disqualified candidates and/or their assigns dealt with the candidacy-registration process.

According to Mr. Sulley, even though each and every one of the disqualified candidates was afforded ample time within which to rectify any anomalies and irregularities or errors that appeared on their registration forms, the disqualified candidates could still not straighten out such anomalies, errors or irregularities. Now, what this tells us about the disqualified candidates is the fact that their attitudes had been almost exclusively and unsavorily governed by raw megalomania than professionalism. In essence, these candidates had eloquently demonstrated beyond any iota of doubt that they lack the requisite discipline to uplift the country to a level worthy of a civilized polity like Ghana. And for this reason alone, they ought to rather feel ashamed of themselves than imperiously presume to gratuitously impugn the professionalism and integrity of the executive operatives of the Electoral Commission.

This critical observation is, however, not in any way to imply that the Charlotte Osei-led Commission has been consistently above board in its performance since the auspicious exit of the decidedly decadent, professionally effete and passionately partisan Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan. But then, whoever said ours were the realm of the celestial and infallible? It, nevertheless, well appears that finally the key operatives of the EC are beginning to get things right. And this ought to be unreservedly applauded, for it can only redound to the transparency and efficiency of our electoral system.

What is also significant to note here is the fact that some of the disqualified presidential candidates had been found to have been endorsed by doubly registered voters, the sort of nation-wreckers who ought to be summarily banned from voting for the rest of their lives, in addition to being rigorously prosecuted and put behind bars for a considerable period of time, to serve as a deterrent to others who may be poised to repeating the same sort of criminal and anti-social behavior. In the coming weeks, we intend to closely monitor the activities of the Electoral Commission and call the shots as we see the same. Where the Commission’s key operatives hit below the belt, as it were, we shall promptly call them out on it; likewise, where Charlotte Osei and her associates perform laudably and creditably, we shall not hesitate to festoon them with our grateful approbation. For at the end of the day, building and making Ghana great is our collective responsibility.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs