To Accept Or Not To Accept...

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

There is no question at all that Ghanaians are bound to accept whatever verdict is handed down by the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel hearing the Akufo-Addo/New Patriotic Party (NPP) Election 2012 Presidential Petition. The Ghanaian I am talking about is the one who fiercely fought the Rawlings dictatorship of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) in order to facilitate the emergence of a culturally democratic Fourth-Republican Ghana. That progressive-minded Ghanaian citizen, by and large belongs to the democratic tradition spearheaded by Messrs. Danquah, Busia and Dombo.

The problem here is that there is another group or set of Ghanaian citizens who are hell-bent on corrupting our Fourth Republican democratic dispensation to suit their own self-serving purposes. This type of Ghanaian belongs to a terror-mongering political organization ironically called the National Democratic Congress (NDC), in much the same way that the pseudo-socialist "Republic" of North Korea is called The Democratic People's Republic of Korea. This is the dilemma in which Ghanaians presently find themselves.

And one is apt to believe that it is this second group of reprobate Ghanaian citizens that the Most Reverend Vincent Sowah Boi-Nai was referring to, when the Roman Catholic Bishop of Yendi recently appealed passionately to the general Ghanaian citizenry to accept the verdict of the Supreme Court on the Election 2012 Presidential Petition.

Interestingly, some mischief-makers have been spreading around the patent falsehood that the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party is an Akan-oriented political organization that won only two of the ten regions of the country in Election 2012. There, of course, is some wicked irony in this trend of argumentation, especially since the population of Ghana is at least comfortably half-Akan. Consequently, if the ineluctably cynical argument of the NPP's being exclusively Akan in agenda and orientation is to be accepted as valid, then the argument of the NPP's having won only two of the five Akan-dominated regions of the country must, of necessity, be held suspect.

The foregoing argument is suspect because it irredeemably insults the intelligence of the Akan people as being, somehow, too self-hating to look towards their collective interests, even as the Anlo-Ewe Trokosi-Wing of the so-called National Democratic Congress routinely "over-votes" in favor of its "Woyomistic" agenda. The fact that the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party twice resoundingly trounced the Ewe-dominated National Democratic Congress ought to send a telling signal to the detractors of the real lovers of Ghanaian democracy that somebody at the headquarters of the Electoral Commission is playing a wicked game with the Akan people of Ghana. And that individual or even group of individuals may be Akan only in name and is/are therefore able to sell his/their people who, of course, are not really his people, down the proverbial creek at the drop of a sack of pelf.

Bishop Boi-Nai also put his finger on the right button, as it were, when the Yendi Diocesan prelate exhorted Ghanaians on the imperative need to promote "truth, dialogue, reconciliation, social healing and restorative justice." Regarding the latter element of "restorative justice," Bishop Boi-Nai could have been even more forthright by observing that as long as Indemnity Clauses flagrantly inserted into the country's 1992 Constitution to protect congenitally self-righteous criminals like Messrs. Rawlings, The Tsikatas and the entire gravy-train drivers of Judgment-Debt executive scam-artists of the so-called National Democratic Congress, Ghana will never know peace.

We may, of course, be able to experience the absence of war, but the presence of peace can only be induced by the dogged pursuit of truth and restorative justice. And, needless to say, both ingredients of sustainable peace and harmony are within the ambit of the mandate of the Atuguba Court.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
July 6, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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