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

I just finished reading an article captioned "No Basis for Annulment of 2.6 M Votes - Lithur," sourced by Ghanaweb.com to the Daily Graphic edition of April 25, 2013, in which Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), is reported to have asserted in court that he is not accusing President John Dramani Mahama of any fraudulent dealings vis-a-vis Election 2012.

The report goes on to state that Dr. Bawumia's argument is only that Mr. Mahama was the prime beneficiary of Dr. Afari-Gyan's flagrant rigging of Election 2012. If the Daily Graphic report has validity, and there is absolutely no reason to believe otherwise, then Dr. Bawumia had better begin accusing Mr. Mahama for the latter's glaring complicity with Dr. Afari-Gyan's ineluctably criminal decision to rig the 2012 polls in favor of the former Bole-Bamboi National Democratic Congress' Member of Parliament.

And the basis of my argument squarely inheres in Mr. Mahama's shamelessly stentorian and consistent lauding of both Dr. Afari-Gyan and the Electoral Commission (EC) for conducting the fairest and finest election in the postcolonial history of the country. The flat and adamant refusal of Mr. Mahama to heed the call by Mr. Rawlings for an independent and thorough investigation into the conduct of Election 2012, indisputably places the prime beneficiary of the fraudulent conduct of Election 2012 in the same category as the culprit, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan!

Then also ought to be vividly underscored the widely reported insistence by President Mahama for the Electoral Commissioner to allow biometrically unverifiable and/or unidentifiable prospective voters to go right ahead and vote, contrary to pre-established protocol. Indeed, the flat refusal of the chairman of the Electoral Commission to review the validity of the polling figures originally published by the EC, even when the head of the Commission had publicly acknowledged the fact of the occurrence of over-voting, or having declared figures way over and above the number of officially registered voters, makes matters even more intriguing.

Still, the fact that Mr. Tony Lithur, the lawyer representing President Mahama, would, on the one hand, admit that remarkable electoral irregularities occurred, and yet insist that such irregularities in no way impacted the integrity and outcome of Election 2012, makes the need for the summary annulment of the results of Election 2012 all the more imperative.

One also clearly recognizes the fact that fairness and justice are decidedly alien to the vocabulary arsenal of Mr. Lithur. For example, the latter presidential counsel sees absolutely nothing amiss with the Electoral Commission's deliberately using the same serial numbers for different polling stations, a practice that is patently anomalous and has not been characteristic of polling in Ghana in the twenty years of the country's Fourth Republican democratic dispensation.

Indeed, the Daily Graphic reporter who composed the news report under review missed the salient thrust of the Akufo-Addo/New Patriotic Party petition when s/he made the following observation: "When Mr. Tony Lithur asked the witness [about] the legal basis for their findings, Dr. Bawumia did not provide any legal basis but [rather] maintained that there were many irregularities."

Well, the irregularities eloquently articulated by the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana constitute the inescapable legality of the NPP petition. In other words, Dr. Bawumia's testimony falls squarely under the imperative need for the integrity of the sacred mandate of the Ghanaian electorate to be protected by Dr. Afari-Gyan and the Electoral Commission. Failure to do so not only invalidates the presidential and/or political legitimacy of Mr. Mahama, it also violates and stultifies the 1992 Republican Constitution, thereby unwisely paving the way for a possible reversion to military dictatorship of the kind nefariously and notoriously pursued by former Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, the founding father of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress, in recent memory.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 25, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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