Franklin Cudjoe should focus on better issues than Hassan Ayariga

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe

The call by the Executive Director of the IMANI-Ghana think-tank for the Chairwoman of the Electoral Commission (EC) to resign is nothing short of the downright and abjectly frivolous (See “Sack EC Boss Over Ayariga’s Comments – Franklin Cudjoe” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/12/16).

The caption of the Classfmonline.com article that carried Mr. Franklin Cudjoe’s call was misleading, because it implied that Mr. Hassan Ayariga may have made some irresponsible public remarks or comments for which his boss, Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei was being asked to take full responsibility by promptly resigning her post.

But, of course, we all know that the Presidential Candidate of the People’s National Convention (PNC) breakaway, the All People’s Congress (APC), is not a staff of the Electoral Commission; and so Mrs. Osei cannot be held accountable for any unfortunate remarks which Mr. Ayariga may have made.

Well, it turns out that the EC Chair was recently invited by the UK-based Chatham House forum organizers to discuss some sticky issues pertaining to Ghana’s upcoming general election during which the name of the elder brother of the Minister of the Environment, Science and Technology, Mr. Mahama Ayariga, came up.

The context, we are told, was in connection with the recent unprecedented spate of the disqualification of some 13 presidential candidates, and an equal number of political parties, for crimes that ranged from minor clerical errors to the felony of double-registration of otherwise eligible voters whose names and signatures had reportedly appeared on the endorsement application forms of several of the disqualified presidential candidates.

We are further told that during the course of her lecture presentation at Chatham House, the EC boss had bluntly and objectively asserted that there would emerge only one winner in the December 7, 2016 presidential election, and that the leader of the APC, Mr. Hassan Ayariga, was guaranteed to be smack among the teeming pack of losers. Well, recent events pertaining to the U.S. presidential election have prompted me to be both modest and cautious about the dangers of drawing hasty conclusions and sweeping generalizations.

Still, one only ought to have just arrived on Planet Earth from one of the unknown but reasonably suspected outer planets to afford the irredeemably uncouth and pathologically megalomaniacal Mr. Ayariga a Chinaman’s chance of clinching a victory in the country’s 2016 presidential election.

We need to also promptly highlight the fact that the decision by Mrs. Osei to cite the name of Mr. Ayariga as one of the certain losers of the 2016 presidential election, while decidedly unprofessional was, nevertheless, not taken in a vacuum.

Indeed, those of us who have been studiously following events on the ground, especially events in the wake of the disqualification of the 13 presidential candidates – several of whom have since been ordered by the Wood Supreme Court to be restored to the ballot – keep wondering why a culturally benighted clinical buffoon like Mr. Ayariga continues to be entertained by the august courts of the land.

And had IMANI-Ghana’s Mr. Cudjoe been closely and objectively following the rhetorical vitriol being spewed at the EC Chair, deliberately and viciously aimed at impugning her chastity, virtually on a daily basis, Mr. Cudjeo would have been more temperate and measured in his rather abrupt call for the resignation of Mrs. Osei, who clearly and absolutely owes Mr. Ayariga no apologies whatsoever.

Indeed, it is unsavorily indulgent opinion leaders like Mr. Cudjoe who make the scandalous likes of Mr. Hassan Ayariga feel self-righteous in their abjectly depraved imbecility. Rather, what Mr. Cudjoe needs to do is to ensure that clinically mental basket cases like Mr. Ayariga seek prompt psychiatric attention.

What is more, even the 1992 Republican Constitution expressly prohibits reprehensible characters like the Bolgatanga native from running for the highest political office of the land. And for all anyone cares to know, Hassan Ayariga may not even be qualified to exercise the franchise.