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

Garden City, New York

Oct. 12, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He may have trained as a lawyer; he may even be serving as the largely absentee National Democratic Congress' (NDC) Member of Parliament for his North-Tongu District of the Volta Region. But the glaring fact of the matter is that other than incessantly badmouthing his intellectual and moral superiors, Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa - an Atta-Mills "sharp-toothed" legacy appointee - has not distinguished himself as either a Deputy Minister of State or a Legislator. And so he may be excused for confusing the criminally bumbling Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan with any one of our national heroes.

I have yet to learn the identity of that hero whom Mr. Ablakwa would have the pathologically mendacious and criminal Dr. Afari-Gyan compared to (See "Leave Afari-Gyan Alone - Ablakwa Tells GBA" Peacefmonline.com 10/12/14). I am also miffed by Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa's reference to Ghana's effectively hobbled 1992 Republican Constitution as an inviolable document of democratic governance. Maybe I fail to see the same because I am not one of the murderous key operatives of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress for whose special and flagrantly undemocratic protection the country's Fourth-Republican Constitution was ingloriously put into operation.

The fact of the matter is that we need a practically effective and morally sound limit on how long the Electoral Commissioner and his Seven Deputies can stay and serve at their most sensitive and politically critical posts, as became incontrovertibly clear during the 2012 Presidential Petition Proceedings at the august Supreme Court of Ghana. And that term limit ought to be far more meaningful than simply allowing whoever gets appointed to literally serve out their entire lifespan on the job. What is more, except for such a minuscle few as Supreme Court judges, no Ghanaian civil and/or public servant, other than popularly elected politicians, get to stay at his/her post past 60 years old, including such invaluably prized brain trusts as our educators, so why should it be any different for the Electoral Commissioner?

Besides, the former Legon political science lecturer clearly exhibited his gross administrative incompetence before Justice William Atuguba, and his other eight Supreme Court associates, during the 2012 Presidential Petition, when Dr. Afari-Gyan deliberately and criminally claimed not to know what constituted both "over-voting" and "under-voting." In other words, the man who had been officially charged with refereeing the conduct and outcome of the electoral mandate of our leaders had absolutely no idea who actually won the 2012 Presidential Election; in effect, Dr. Afari-Gyan had ridden roughshod over all legitimate protestations of the people and their sacred mandate to cynically and unconscionably declare the Transitional-Incumbent, President John Dramani Mahama, as "the clear and undisputed winner of Election 2012."

Come to think of it, Dr. Afari-Gyan had been serving at his post for some twenty years! I mean, how many Ghanaians would tolerate the tenured employment of an elementary or high schoolteacher who could not creditably explain to an understandably anxious parent how his/her child or ward received a failing grade? I also don't know where the executive operatives of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) went wrong in promptly calling for a veritable professional disaster like Dr. Afari-Gyan never to be visited upon the pates of Ghanaians ever again.

The sinecured likes of the Deputy Education Minister have the luxury of being perfectly comfortable with abjectly poor professional excuses like Dr. Afari-Gyan and some of his cohorts at the Electoral Commission; but for the rest of us, Ghana's outgoing Electoral Commissioner is an inexcusable disaster that ought not to have happened to our country. Besides, it is already October; and Dr. Afari-Gyan is statutorily scheduled for retirement in less than twelve months. So wherein lies the wrongfulness of the solemn call by the Ghana Bar Association for President Mahama to start looking for a more administratively viable replacement for Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan?

And, by the way, is this the same Ghana into which I was delivered a half-century ago?! Tweakai!