By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 22, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The November 21 National Democratic Congress’ presidential primary pretty much recalled the one-party political farce that characterized the essence of the primitive governance culture of the immediate post-independence era of twentieth-century Africa, largely the period between 1950 and 1980. It actually stretched well into the 1990s. This was the period when in Francophone African countries like Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Togo, Senegal, the so-called Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon, among a host of others, the unopposed presidential candidate could actually receive 98-percent of the votes. In Anglophone Africa, we witnessed such burlesque in Ghana during the turbulent tenure of the Kwame Nkrumah-led regime of the tautologically named Convention People’s Party (CPP); and in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, respectively, we had Messrs. Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Karamoge Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda, who is still alive and sprightly, at least as he appeared to be at the funeral of the globally immortalized President Nelson R. Mandela.

President John Dramani Mahama was reported to have clinched 95.1-percent of the ballot. And this, of course, was largely because the party’s top-hierarchy operatives, led by the notorious cross-dressing General-Secretary Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, had virulently and predictably prevented at least one bold and courageous candidate, 45-year-old Mr. George Boateng, from contesting the incumbent. At another time in our country’s political history, Mr. Boateng would have been consigned to lethal injection at Nsawam, Ghana’s infamous prison for President Nkrumah’s most formidable political and ideological opponents. By all accounts, an indefatigable District Youth Organizer of the Oyarifa, Greater-Accra, branch of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. Boateng had been in the good books of nearly every one of the key operatives of the ruling party until, claiming to be fed up with the gross managerial incompetence of Mr. Mahama, the young man confidently decided to throw his proverbial hat in the ring. His sanity would shortly be questioned and impugned. He would even be forced to seek the psychiatric opinion of medical experts at the country’s notorious Pantang Mental Hospital.

Even more curiously, albeit predictably, the Mahama antagonist would be summarily denied access to the presidential primary’s nomination and/or application forms. Actually, he would be sold the same, but only to have Mr. Asiedu-Nketia promptly proscribe them by asserting that Mr. Boateng’s forms were duds. Equally fascinatingly, the Chief Accountant of the National Democratic Congress for some twenty-odd years, together with several others, would be summarily fired for making these same “dud” presidential primary nomination forms available to Mr. Boateng, who at the time described himself as a freight-forwarder by profession. It is not known whether Mr. Boateng has had the fee for the proscribed nomination forms refunded to him by Mr. Asiedu-Nketia or any of his deputies and/or assigns. As of this writing, what was known, however, was that not only had Mr. Boateng been flagrantly and, perhaps, even criminally, denied his inalienable constitutional right to contest President Mahama in the NDC presidential primary, he had also been reportedly summarily expelled from the party.

And so this is the scandalous state of democratic cultural praxis among the top-echelon membership of Ghana’s ruling National Democratic Congress. You would have thought that Ghana were either North Korea or China. This is no sheer coincidence, of course. The Nkrumah-leaning National Democratic Congress has made no bones about the fact of its leadership’s look towards Beijing and, to a lesser extent, Moscow for its marching orders, even more than two decades after the effective collapse of the Marxist economic system. Indeed, so disgusted was Mr. Martin Amidu with the manner in which his party’s latest presidential primary was conducted that the former Attorney-General turned “Citizen Vigilante” did not hesitate to carp the National Democratic Congress as a regressive political organization hell-bent on pursuing the dictatorial and cannibalistic tenets of an “Orwellian State.”

It is not clear whether Mr. Amidu who, as Attorney General, was summarily fired by then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, for standing up boldly against the government’s attempt at covering up the Woyome Scandal, voted in the NDC’s presidential primary, although he is widely reported to have actively participated in the party’s primaries. If he, indeed, cast his ballot for the unopposed candidacy of President Mahama, then he is all the more hypocritical for doing so. Even so, what ought to worry Ghanaians more than anything else, in the lead-up to Election 2016, is the credibility of the country’s voters’ register. So far, more than an acceptable level of electoral-roll irregularities has been reported around the country. In the main, it has entailed the illegal padding/bloating of the NDC voters’ register with the names of non-NDC eligible Ghanaian voters.

I suppose this is what election experts mean when they talk of multiple registration of voters. I hope Electoral Commissioner Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei has been paying sedulous attention. After all, it was the establishment that she heads that conducted the National Democratic Congress’ presidential and parliamentary primaries.