The Centre for Strategic & International Studies
(CSIS), a U.S- based research firm which provides strategic insights and partisan
policy solution to decision makers, governments, international institutions,
the private sector and civil society says the 2012 elections in Ghana may end
in violence.
“A
second, low-to-medium probability but high-impact scenario would be a violently
contested Presidential election in December 2012, which will have the potential
to produce chaos,”the CSIS said in its June 2011 project
report commissioned by the U.S Africa Command (AFRICOM) as part of a report of
a series examining the risk of instability in 10 African countries over the
next decade.
While blaming the potential for violence in the 2012
elections on many factions, including the bitter rivalry between the two
dominant political parties, the NDC and the NPP, the report particularly
mentioned the NPP’s flagbearer, Nana Akufo-Addo’s desperation and his
violence-infested rhetoric as a major spark which can trigger violence in Ghana
during the elections.
“The
role of the NPP leader and expected Presidential candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, will
be crucial and early signals suggest reasons for worry. Akufo-Addo is desperate
to mobilize support, and he has played the ethnic card, referring to the NPP as
“We the Akans”, urging his supporters to “all die be die” – that is, they
should be willing to die to ensure the NPP’s victory”
the report said in part.
Nana Akufo-Addo’s incitement of his supporters to
resort to violence, the history of his supporters beating up supporters of his
main rival, Alan Kyeremanteng, in the run-up to the NPP’s primaries and the
kind of company he keeps makes discerning people in Ghana apprehensive that he
will not hesitate to throw Ghana into a state of anarchy should he lose the
2012 elections, (which is likely) since it is probably his last opportunity to
realize his life-long ambition of becoming President of Ghana.
The CSIS is even more apprehensive about Akufo-Addo
plunging Ghana into civil war because the Abuakwa lawyer nearly did just that
in the 2008 elections first after the results of the December 7, 2008 polls was
announced and again when Prof. Mills beat him to it after the December 28, 2008
run-off.
“Ghana
had a lucky escape during the last Presidential elections in December 2008. The
razor-thin failure of the NPP candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, to win the Presidency
on the first ballot (he missed out by less that 8,000 votes) briefly tempted
the NPP to hang on to power and challenge the official results. In the hours
following the election, then-President Kufuor played a vital role in urging his
NPP supporters to accept the need for a second round. When the NDC candidate,
Atta-Mills, won the second round by the narrow margin of 0.46percent, President
Kufuor again urged acceptance of the results. But, given that he is now in
retirement, Kufuor is unlikely to be ask to exert a mediatory influence in
2012,”the report said, adding, rather gloomily, that “And the NPP hardliners seem to
have seized
control of the campaign.”
In the recently released cables from wikileaks, U.S
Ambassador, Donald Teitelbum noted that though Nana Akufo-Addo reluctantly
congratulating Prof. Mills after the Electoral Commission declared the latter
winner of the 2008 elections, he never conceded defeat.
Many Ghanaians are still wondering what would have
become of Ghana if Akufo-Addo’s henchmen had succeeded in dumping corpses in
the Volta Region as they had been caught on tape planning to do so they could
claim the corpses were their polling agents killed in the NDC stronghold. Then
also was the attempt by Akufo-Addo loyalists to get a High Court sit on a
statutory public holiday to place an injunction on the announcing of the final
results by the Electoral Commission. Fortunately, this backfired.
The penchant to dispute electoral results when they
do not win at the polls has been the stock-in-trade of the NPP and its forbearers
even before independence. In his book DARK DAYS IN GHANA pages 52-56, Ghana’s
first President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, said the Busia-Danquah political tradition,
which the NPP belongs to “…have a long
record of go-slow policies, of subversive activity…unable to gain victory at
the polls, they even resorted to assassination plots in order to impose
themselves on the people of Ghana, and to avenge their political defeat.”
It is these dark days that the CSIS fears may become
the lot of Ghana when the 2012 electoral results are announced, bearing in mind
the behaviour of Nana Akufo-Addo in the 2008 elections.
Stay
tuned for reasons the CSIS’s research unearthed which made it conclude that the
2012 elections is “a potential trigger of instability in Ghana.”