Rumor Mill of Saturday, 27 November 2004

Source: GHANA PALAVER INTELLIGENCE

Is it true that---

? The NPP has developed a region-specific rigging strategy depending on their perceived strengths and weaknesses in the various regions and that for the Volta Region where they perceive themselves to be very weak, the Party has devised a strategy code-named "Operation Scatter" under which their trained thugs, already infiltrated into the Party Police, will be assigned two to a polling station in plain clothes and armed with an AK 47 assault rifle each, and that around 4.00 p.m. on Election Day, they will appear at the polling stations in the Volta Region and begin to fire indiscriminately, causing panic, havoc, mayhem and general confusion, and in the ensuing melee, ballot boxes will disappear, ballot boxes will be switched, ballot boxes will be stuffed, and ballot boxes will be burnt, forcing the electoral officers either to flee or to declare fictitious results in favour of the NPP, the Party having assured itself that no Ghanaian court will interfere with any of the 2004 election results should the NPP win fairly or falsely, howsoever and whensoever declared?

? Over and above the region-specific strategy, the NPP has also developed a uniform, country-wide rigging strategy to be of general application, one of which is to remove at the very last moment most of the Electoral Commission (EC) officials and EC-appointed officials, especially teachers from the Ghana Education Service who are perceived to be peeved against the NPP Government first on account of their salaries which were slashed in August 2004 at the instance of the IMF/World Bank, and secondly, undermining Auditor-General Eddie Duah-Agyeman's threat to suspend their salaries if they did not remove some ghost names from their pay vouchers, and to replace the sacked teachers with boys purposely trained for the purpose by the NPP, who would have their hair oiled with a special kind of grease and that in the course of the voting, each time a suspected NDC voter appears, the boys would frisk their own hair with their fingers and deliberately touch the space in front of one of the non-NDC candidates before tearing the ballot paper for him or her, that the special grease is conditioned to reflect on the ballot paper after some time, so that by the time it comes to counting the ballot papers, all those ballot papers would be rejected as there would be two thumbprint marks, one for the NDC candidate and the smeared one in front of another candidate, rendering the entire ballot paper invalid?

? A certain OO, associated with a certain M. Hotel in a major Ghanaian border town, brother of a certain SO, a leading lawyer who had plans of being made the Chief Justice but which plans were disappointed on account of the fact that he belonged to the wrong tribe and did not fit into the ethnic agenda governance system of the Kufuor cabal, and who is also one of the leading moneybags of the NPP, is the one leading an NPP gang and buying Voters' Identification Cards off unsuspecting members of the public in that border town where he has the M. Hotel and the surrounding settlements?