Number One Electoral Reform: Mahama Is Out!

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

It is rather silly, to speak much less about the downright oafish, for Mr. Murtala Mohammed to assert that the Electoral Commissioner, having forensically failed in the creditable performance of his paid constitutional obligation, still retains the authority, over the highest court of the land, to decide who won the 2012 presidential election.

In effect, what the Deputy Information Minister and former Convention People's Party (CPP) propagandist, if memory serves me accurately, clearly appears to be calling for is an all-out war, in the likely event of our august Supreme Court's August 29 verdict not going in favor of Mr. Mohammed's paymaster (See "SC Cannot Declare Winner of an Election - Minister" New Statesman/Ghanaweb.com 8/27/13).

Mr. Murtala Mohammed is widely reported to have told a Ho-based radio station, of all places of Ghanaian democratic political culture, that the "petition currently before the Supreme Court will only result in electoral reforms." Well, I have news for the young man with the longitudinal tribal grooves on his puffy cheeks; and it is the incontrovertible fact that the constitutional article that granted the right of Nana Akufo-Addo and his associates of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to seek electoral redress, did not in any way counsel cosmetic reforms as the ultimate verdict of the Supreme Court of Ghana.

We know that National Democratic Congress bulldogs like Mr. Mohammed do not respect the august institution of the Supreme Court; but they must rest assured that those jack-booted days of terror-mongering and murderous savagery of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) are decidedly a part of the garbage heap of Ghana's political history.

If, indeed, the Supreme Court has no power to referee and decide the outcome of a forensically proven fraudulent election, that also deeply involved the criminal collusion of the Electoral Commissioner, then how does the rascally NDC-MP for Nanton - wherever that is on the map of the erstwhile Gold Coast Colony - justify the legitimacy of the Mahama posse's continuous hang onto power without the imperative use of force to dislodge the same?

The Nigerian- (Hausa-)looking (the bastard actually reminds me of Ade Coker) Mr.Mohammed clearly appears to be living in a fool's paradise; and he had better be promptly woken out of his trance or slumber and smell the proverbial Tuo Zaafi. Needless to say, the Information Ministry's second-bananas also clearly appears to be in contempt of the Supreme Court and ought to be either promptly called to order by his boss, including his being asked to tender his resignation.

Indeed, the very notion, on the part of Mr. Mohammed, that absolutely no power under the Ghanaian political firmament can legitimately oust President Mahama, in of itself, ineluctably constitutes a declaration of war and ought to seriously be envisaged as such, and fiercely countervailed by the Akufo-Addo/NPP petitioners.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
August 27, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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